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Navi Pillay said Tel Aviv's two-week onslaught on Gaza - which has cost more than 650 Palestinians lives - would be thoroughly investigated. Ms Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the attacks have destroyed houses and hospitals and killed civilians. "These are just a few examples where there seems to be a strong possibility that international humanitarian law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes. "Every one of these incidents must be properly and independently investigated." According to Gaza officials, 475 houses have been destroyed and 2,644 damaged, while 46 schools, 56 mosques...

GENEVA, July 23 (Reuters) - The United Nations on Wednesday launched an international inquiry into human rights violations and crimes that may have been committed by Israel during its military offensive in the Gaza Strip. The U.N. Human Rights Council condemned the Israeli assault which it said had involved "disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks", including aerial bombing of civilian areas, collective punishment, and the killing of more than 650 Palestinians. At the end of an emergency session, the 47-member forum adopted a resolution presented by Palestinians by a vote of 29 states in favor, 1 against (the United States) with 17...

Asserting that India's policy on Palestine issue remains unchanged, government on Monday refused to take sides over the Gaza conflict as it said Israel and Palestine should have peace talks and forestalled a resolution in Rajya Sabha which was demanded by the opposition. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said the House should not be divided but send out a joint message that wherever there is violence, it is condemnable and both Israel and Palestine should accept Egypt's offer of peace talks. She was replying to a short-duration debate on Gaza situation during which opposition condemned the violence in Gaza, pressed...

Sergey Glaziev the head of the Russian central bank in her discussion with Vladimir Putin, unveiled an elegant technical solution for this problem and left a clear hint regarding the members of the anti-dollar alliance that is being created by the efforts of Moscow and Beijing. On June 10th, Sergey Glaziev, Putin's economy advisor published an article outlining the need to establish an international alliance of countries willing to get rid of the dollar in international trade and refrain from using dollars in their currency reserves. The ultimate goal would be to break the Washington's money printing machine that is...

South Africa’s ruling party on Thursday issued a statement in which it compared Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza to the actions of the Nazis during World War II. The statement by the African National Congress (ANC) did not mention the rocket attacks from Gaza which led Israel to launch Operation Protective Edge. “The African National Congress (ANC), condemns in the strongest terms, the barbaric attacks on the defenseless Palestinian people of Gaza,” said the statement by the party’s Deputy Secretary General, Jessie Duarte. “As we move towards the month of August and are reminded of [the] atrocities of Nazi Germany, surely...

Johannesburg - Journalists were forced to take off their shoes, and get down on their knees before Venda traditional leaders at a media briefing in Johannesburg on Sunday. The bizarre briefing was over a report by the Sowetan newspaper last week that SABC chief operations officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng had been given a wife as a gift. At the start of the briefing by Mudzi Wa Vhurereli ha Vhavenda, a lobby group of Venda traditional leaders and healers, reporters were instructed to remove their shoes and get on bended knees so that they could perform a cultural ritual before beginning. Most...

South African President Jacob Zuma was admitted to a hospital for tests on Saturday, and doctors are satisfied with his condition, his office said. The announcement came two weeks after Zuma was inaugurated for a second five-year term following the election victory last month of the ruling African National Congress party. …

F.W. de Klerk, who served as the last President of apartheid-era South Africa, said on Wednesday that it was unfair to say that Israel is an apartheid state. De Klerk, who is visiting Israel where he received an honorary doctorate from Haifa University, gave an interview to Channel 2 News, in which he was asked about comments recently attributed to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, that Israel would become “an apartheid state” if talks failed. “There are many definitions of apartheid. I do not know what Mr. Kerry meant, but one should be careful about making comparisons,” said de...

The ANC government has received a request from the U.S. was rejected to be part of a U.S. disaster management plan which South Africa $ 10 billion a year (about R100 billion) for ten years would receive. According to the plan would be temporary housing for millions of Americans in South Africa built if the Yellowstone super volcano in the country sooner or later would come to a head. Countries that the U.S. will participate noodlenigingsplan, Brazil, Argentina and Australia. A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Sipho Matwetwe, South Africa will not "part of the plan because...

When South Africa buried apartheid with its first all-race election in 1994, the Rev. Desmond Tutu danced with joy as he cast his ballot. He called it "a religious experience, a transfiguration experience, a mountaintop experience." As the country votes Wednesday, here's what he recently told the Sunday Times newspaper: "I didn't think there would be a disillusionment so soon. I'm glad that (Nelson Mandela) is dead. I'm glad that most of these people are no longer alive to see this," a reference to a host of chronic problems such as corruption and poverty. Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate...

This week marks the 20th anniversary of democracy in South Africa. You may remember the United States was intensely interested in South African affairs during the years the Afrikaners, the country’s European-descended population, ruled under a racist policy called apartheid. Then, on April 27, 1994, after years of international pressure, South Africa held its first open elections. The black majority population overwhelmingly chose Nelson Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist and former political prisoner, as the nation’s first black president. America soon lost interest. It was as if a war had ended, and we could concern ourselves with other things. Twenty years...

Phakisho Mojaplo, 20, belongs to a new generation of South Africans who never experienced firsthand the harsh system of white minority rule that ended in 1994, and will vote in national elections for the first time on Wednesday. She is deeply dissatisfied with what she describes as a growing culture of elitism and corruption in her country despite its new freedoms and other advances during her lifetime. Chief among Mojaplo’s grievances is her sense that the ruling African National Congress, which is expected to win re-election with a possibly reduced majority, has betrayed the commitments to clean governance and basic...

Two founders of the Pink Floyd rock band have called on the Rolling Stones to cancel a concert in Israel in an op-ed for news website Salon.com. In the article, titled “Why the Rolling Stones shouldn’t play in Israel”, Roger Waters and Nick Mason wrote: “Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of South African apartheid.” The aging rockers added that the Rolling Stones’ Israel concert comes at “a critical time in the global struggle for Palestinian freedom and equal rights.” The Stones are due to perform on June 4 at Tel Aviv’s...

Hundreds of thousands of whites left South Africa following the ANC's landslide election victory in 1994. Twenty years on, the exodus shows signs of slowing, even reversing. Jane Flanagan spoke to some of those who have returned. Nicky and Craig Irving spent five years in Australia before moving back to Cape Town with their three daughters. They were among the last members of their respective families to emigrate amid fears over the crime wave that swept South Africa during the 1990s. "The challenge to us from our relatives who had left was 'How can you raise your children in a...

Israel-bashing figures prominently in 'teach-ins' where San Franciscans seek a flavor of the Vietnam era Let's admit it - San Francisco is gorgeous, and deserves its name as the capital of resistance to what the US is trying to do in the Middle East. After all, while other places from coast to coast had rallies and marches before and during Operation Iraqi Freedom, only there were thousands "hauled off by the pigs" for blocking the financial district, and only there was there a rally and march almost every Saturday for weeks and weeks until Saturday, April 19. But were all...

Retired archbishop Desmond Tutu has said he is happy Nelson Mandela is dead—so he does not have to see what South Africa’s current leaders are doing to the country. Since Jacob Zuma became president, Tutu has become increasingly critical of the African National Congress (ANC), which has held power in South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994—first under the leadership of Mandela. “I didn’t think there would be a disillusionment so soon,” he told South Africa’s Sunday Times, before adding: “I’m glad that Madiba is dead. I’m glad that most of these people are no longer alive to...

Under apartheid inter-racial relationships were banned in South Africa. Journalist Mpho Lakaje, who is married to a white woman, reflects on how the country has changed in the 20 years since the end of white minority rule. When I started dating the woman I was to marry many of my friends and some of her family - black and white - were united in opposition.

Six months pregnant, Elizabeth Kganyo was determined to cast her vote, even if it meant standing in a sun-baked queue for hours on end. "I was so excited because it was the first time," she recalls, sitting on an upturned plastic basket outside her shack in Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg. "Everybody wanted to vote. Everybody was happy." South Africa held its first multiracial election 20 years ago on Sunday, defying bombs, bluster and the threat of civil war to conjure a spectacle of voters in long, winding lines that ravished the world. But for Kganyo, like millions of others who...

The multi-coloured flag of modern South Africa is a symbol of its post-apartheid rebirth. But while Nelson Mandela led the country on a "long walk" to freedom, the creation of the flag 20 years ago was a frantic sprint by an unsung hero, writes Xin Fan. On a Saturday night at the end of February 1994 Fred Brownell's phone rang. The voice on the other end asked him to get a new national flag designed - within a week. "It scared the living daylights out of me," says Brownell, now 74 and living in retirement in Pretoria. Brownell was state...

South Africa on Sunday celebrates the 20th anniversary of its first ever all-race, democratic election that ended decades of sanctioned racial oppression under the apartheid system. The day will be marked by street parades, speeches, prayers, music and military salutes and displays. President Jacob Zuma leads the main festivities at the Union Buildings, the seat of government in Pretoria, where generations of apartheid leaders penned many of the racial laws that South Africa’s first black leader Nelson Mandela fought most of his life. After the historic April 27, 1994, the day has been retained as a holiday and named Freedom...