Every day Usama Khalid jumps into a car or taxi queuing at an Israeli checkpoint. The 11-year-old Palestinian is an officially sanctioned human shield. For the Israeli troops who squint out of a watchtower, the boy’s presence is proof that a suicide bomber is not at the wheel of the car.
The radical group, Gush Shalom, sent letters to 15 senior officers advising them that imposing collective punishments or making hostages of civilians violated the Geneva Convention. It said the officers had been identified by their own statements to the media.
In the heady days after the Taliban fell, Western politicians developed a simple refrain. ”This time we will not walk away,” they promised. By that they meant no repetition of what happened after Western-supported Mujahedin forces gained control of Afghanistan a decade earlier.
Imagine a prime minister who makes his first visit to the world’s fourth largest democracy and refuses to meet the leader of the opposition.
More than 1 900 people have died in Kashmir’s vicious separatist struggle this year, including 136 people in the first half of August, official sources say.
Doctors working with returning refugees have discovered people with an almost forgotten disease, scurvy
According to a UN source, Annan is dissatisfied with the work of a particular Japanese official in another post in the UN, and wants to remove him.
