The News Review:

- Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs
- Some allies find US policy unjust
- Africa’s bloody children
- Two face charges after €500,000 heroin find

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs
Asia Times Online – Aug 20, 2005
Since no known calculus exists for determining what level of violence qualifies as the initial stage of a civil war, we cannot know if Allawi was correct. There has certainly been a rise in inter-communal killings, particularly between Arab Sunnis and Shi’ites, to go with the deadly battle between occupation and government forces and the insurgents. But we have not yet seen the kind of sustained military engagements, a la Lebanon, the Balkans or Sierra Leone, nor the specter of large-scale ethnic cleansing that would put Allawi’s claim beyond doubt. Two years ago, Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa predicted ominously that an invasion would “open the gates of hell” in the region. At the time, Western ears heard melodrama in that warning, the bombastic rhetoric of an out-of-time Arab nationalist. In retrospect, of course, it was nothing if not prescient. The invasion unleashed unspeakable horrors – cities bombed to ruin, gritty urban combat, gruesome beheadings, apocalyptic car bombings.

Some allies find US policy unjust
International Herald Tribune – Aug 20, 2005
Still, Ecuador has lost $15 million in aid since 2003 and may lose $7 million this year. When the International Criminal Court's 18 judges took their oaths in March 2003, the tribunal was backed by 139 countries and heralded by supporters as the most ambitious project in modern international law. It was intended to replace the ad hoc tribunals organized to address atrocities in such places as Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. This year the United Nations Security Council, with the United States abstaining, gave the court approval to prosecute cases related to atrocities in Darfur, Sudan. Many legal scholars say it is unlikely that Americans would ever face the court because its focus is on the most egregious of war crimes, like systematic genocide, and the court is intended to try cases from countries where the judicial systems are unable or unwilling to handle such cases. There are also safeguards that would give U.

Africa’s bloody children
Times Online – Aug 20, 2005
Used on article pages to rotate the images of a story. After Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s accomplished novel about a child soldier in Sierra Leone earlier this year, Moses, Citizen and Me, these two very young first novelists have written striking accounts of the way war sucks children into its blood-soaked ranks. The setting is again African, but the theme is universal — all over the world, children are enlisted to die for their parents’ quarrels, and Iweala and Holding’s own youth (Iweala, a Nigerian-American, is only 23, Zimbabwean Holding 27) gives them a direct line to the uncertain, adrenalin-fuelled world of their boy protagonists. Holding’s book is set in an African country very similar to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, though the dictator is never mentioned by name. It is ambitiously structured with a narrative that zigzags forward and back in time from the moment when Dave, only son and heir to paradisal Edenfields Farm, is left an orphan by the brutal murder of his parents by black settlers. Dave’s very existence then becomes a reproach to the remaining white farmers, who pack Dave precipitously off to boarding school.

Two face charges after €500,000 heroin find
Ireland Online – Aug 21, 2005
Two and a half kilos of the drug, with an estimated street value of â500,000, was seized during a planned garda operation in the OâConnell Avenue area of the city last Thursday night. Appearing before a special sitting of Limerick District Court on Saturday were; Mohammad Kargbo, aged 33, from Sierra Leone with an address at Ann Street, Limerick, and Emmanuel Ashibogwu, aged 25, from Nigeria with an address at Clyde House in Limerick.