Free Republic

IRAN is seeking to import large consignments of bomb-making uranium from the African mining area that produced the Hiroshima bomb, an investigation has revealed. A United Nations report, dated July 18, said there was “no doubt” that a huge shipment of smuggled uranium 238, uncovered by customs officials in Tanzania, was transported from the Lubumbashi mines in the Congo. Tanzanian customs officials told The Sunday Times it was destined for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, and was stopped on October 22 last year during a routine check. The disclosure will heighten western fears about the extent of Iran’s presumed...

KOENIGSTEIN, Germany, MAY 29, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The Church has helped Zambia to turn the corner in the fight against HIV and it has done so by upholding its traditional teachings, says a Ndola Diocese official. "Meanwhile, the government has done too little, too late," said Father Alick Mbanda, chancellor of the Zambian diocese, in an interview during a recent visit to the headquarters of the charity Aid to the Church in Need. He explained how Catholic-run programs to combat HIV had been vital in bringing about a long-awaited downturn in the number of people infected with the virus. HIV is...

Thom Hickling, an offbeat evangelical who influenced the Christian community in Pittsburgh through his creation of Expression newspaper and the His Place television show, died yesterday in a car crash in Zambia. Mr. Hickling, 51, was visiting his daughter, Holly, 23 who was doing mission work in a refugee camp in that African nation. Her leg was broken in the crash and she is to fly back to Pittsburgh tomorrow. His body is still in Zambia. Services will eventually be held in Pittsburgh and in Baltimore, where he had lived since 1997. Mr. Hickling, his daughter, and another worker from...

ONE of the suspected masterminds of the July 7 London terror bombings has been holed up in Zimbabwe, reports said last night. The Associated Press reported Thursday night that Haroon Rashid Aswat, 31, had been arrested by Zambian authorities after entering the country from Zimbabwe. British investigators pursuing the terrorists whose carefully planned attacks on London's transport network killed 56 people say Aswat had telephone contact with some of the July 7 bombers. It was not immediately clear how long Aswat had been living in Zimbabwe, or where he was living, although a Zambian official who spoke on condition of...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- British authorities denied a U.S. request to apprehend a man believed to have ties to the July 7 London bombings weeks before the deadly attacks, sources familiar with the investigation said Thursday.Haroon Rashid Aswat, 30, a British-born citizen of Indian heritage, is in custody in Zambia, U.S. and Zambian officials told CNN. U.S. authorities wanted to capture Aswat, who was then in South Africa, and question him about a 1999 plot to establish a "jihad training camp" in Bly, Oregon. According to the sources, U.S. officials had Aswat under surveillance in South Africa weeks before the July...

The G8 leaders' pronouncement last Friday about aid to Africa reflected the views of international bureaucrats who, as Paul Theroux wrote, ride from meeting to meeting in new Land Rovers. I wish they would instead ride on the back of a Mitsubishi flatbed truck with 39 Africans jubilantly and melodically singing of their faith in Christ: "He is not number eight. He is not number six. He is number one." Standing behind the cab was like being at the prow of a ship with the wind blowing hard and dirt roads tough on truck suspensions taking the place of waves....

. . . for receiving Holy CommunionROMAN Catholic Church members have protested over the decision by former president Frederick Chiluba to receive Holy Communion at the Requiem Mass for the late Zambia Democratic Conference (ZADECO) president Dean Mung'omba on Friday. And Chiluba yesterday apologised for receiving the Holy Communion, saying that his participation in the Holy Communion was not to slight the Catholic Church. Zambia Episcopal Conference (ZEC) spokesperson Father Paul Samasumo confirmed yesterday that various members of the Church protested over Chiluba's resolution to partake the Holy Communion even when he knew that he was not Catholic. "This issue...

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned Friday that the outbreak of the deadly virus Marburg which has killed 174 people in Angola is not yet under control. "The situation right now in Angola is not under control yet," Mike Ryan, head of the WHO's emergency response unit, told reporters here. He asked international agencies and local health authorities to remain firmly engaged in Angola for the next four to six weeks to control the epidemic. "This is still a crisis, and a health crisis at the national level, and requires a profound commitment from national authorities and the international community,"...

Kenya's government, which was elected on a pledge to fight corruption, has been hit by the resignation of its chief anti-corruption official John Githongo this week. Donor countries have threatened to suspend aid if they cannot be sure that their money will be well spent. Kenya's leaders are not the only ones to find that eradicating corrupt practices is a tall order. Sceptics fear that the UK-led move to increase aid to Africa and forgive their debts will only make more money available to corrupt elites. Western governments are increasingly linking aid to good governance, and in particular to efforts...

Aid workers tending to the ravaged islands and coastlines of southern Asia say a big concern is an outbreak of malaria and other waterborne diseases.... Which reminds us of a just-out World Health Organization report anticipating a shortage in a key antimalarial drug.... This news about treatments wouldn't be so devastating but for the fact that the international groups in charge still can't get malaria prevention under control. And that's the real tragedy. A blight that has been all but eliminated in the West, malaria still claims between one million and two million lives every year in the underdeveloped world....

DURBAN - In an extraordinary twist to the current tensions between the United States and Iraq, former South African president (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Nelson Mandela has not only sided strongly against President George W. Bush, but appears on the point of being recruited to a stratagem by Saddam Hussein to block U.S. military intervention. Mandela has uttered stronger and stronger statements critical of Bush. Originally he attempted to telephone the U.S. President to communicate his views, but Bush did not take his calls, so Mandela phoned ex-president George Bush Sr. to complain about his son and ask for...

HARARE, Zimbabwe - A few yards from Raymond Majongwe's office, on the apron of a four-lane highway outside this capital city's downtown, a cherry red sedan sat recently beneath a clutch of trees, its engine off, the driver idle. The sedan has been there for weeks, Mr. Majongwe said. It will be there next week, too. Mr. Majongwe is the head of a rebel schoolteacher's union. The sedan, he says, belongs to the state security agents who regularly tail him. It testifies to what political and human-rights advocates here call the growing suppression of civic life in Zimbabwe as President...

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA - At the Jordan Inn, a small cafe in a dusty settlement 10 miles outside Lusaka, nearly everyone has strong feelings about Zambia's former President Frederick Chiluba. "He's a thief," shouts Lameck Make, a local butcher. "He should go to jail." "We should make an example of him," chimes the cafe's patron, Valentine Munyake. Few Zambians have good things to say about Mr. Chiluba, who is accused of stealing millions of dollars from the public coffers. Instead, they're cheering on the anticorruption campaign of the country's new president, Levy Manawasa. In a bold political move, Mr. Manawasa –...

The devastating effect on Zimbabwe of dictator Robert Mugabe's land seizures is well-known. In 10 years the country has been transformed from Africa's breadbasket into another African basket case -- marked by unemployment, starvation and violence. The fate of the evicted white farmers has been less publicized. While many left the continent, others have been welcomed by neighboring African countries eager to profit from their agricultural knowledge and expertise. Zimbabwe's loss has been their gain. Zambia has led the move, and the country has moved from food shortages in the 1990s to actually exporting food -- ironically much of it...

VICE-President Nevers Mumba has ordered the police to arrest any witch-hunter who searches people’s houses without a search warrant. Vice-President Mumba made the instruction on Friday when he addressed heads of government departments, civil societies, churches and NGOS at Petauke School hall. He said no one was allowed to conduct a search without a search warrant. Vice-President Mumba was prompted to issue the warning after Father Martin of the Petauke Catholic church complained that witch-finders had flooded the area especially during the harvest season. Fr. Martin said the witch finders exploited people by charging them animals. Vice-President Mumba commanded the...

KAYANJE FARM, Zambia - When a truckload of government-sponsored thugs chased Chris Thorne and his family from their wheat and soybean farm in Zimbabwe three years ago, ransacking his home and decrying him as a racist, Thorne was left to wonder whether a white farmer like him could have a future in Africa. Thorne is finding his answer in Zambia. Just north of Lusaka, Zambia's sleepy capital, Thorne is busy felling trees, leveling termite hills and laying irrigation lines to expand his new 7,000-acre tobacco and maize farm. "The opportunities are endless here," says Thorne, a ruddy-faced 56-year-old, who clicks...

SHINKOLOBWE, Congo (AP) - Business is booming in the mining zone that supplied uranium for the atomic bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - despite a decree by Congo's president banning all mining activity here. President Joseph Kabila ordered the zone closed three months ago amid growing concerns that unregulated nuclear materials could get into the hands of so-called rogue nations or terrorist groups. Yet 1,000 miles away from the capital, Kinshasa, thousands of diggers are still hacking away at a dark cavity of open earth in this southeastern village, filling thousands of burlap sacks a day with black soil...

Anglican Communion: an imminent parting of the ways? by Margaret Rodgers Will the Anglican Communion see an imminent parting of the ways? British newspapers have, on more than one occasion in the last few weeks, predicted that the worldwide Anglican Communion is moving closer to a break-up. The Telegraph (London) said in early March that Anglicanism was edging ‘closer to disintegration’. This came in the context of their report of the Canadian General Synod announcement that their General Synod, to meet in Ontario next month, would debate a motion that affirmed there was no bar to Canadian dioceses authorising the...

HISAMBA, Zambia — Douglas Watt is part of a most curious diaspora in Southern Africa: prosperous white farmers, vilified as greedy racists and driven out of Zimbabwe, looking for a home.Mr. Watt left the country of his birth about a year ago after what has become a common sort of encounter there. The husband of a worker in the office of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe politely told Mr. Watt that he was taking over his farm and that Mr. Watt had 90 days to get out.Today Mr. Watt is one of about 140 white Zimbabwean farmers who have relocated...

UK charities exaggerated Africa crisis, says report John Vidal, environment editor Friday January 16, 2004 The Guardian Some of Britain's leading international charities who tried to help southern Africa avoid a food crisis in 2002-03 overstated the seriousness of the situation to the public, failed to consult the people they were trying to help and did not listen to people's needs, according to an independent evaluation of the year-long emergency seen by the Guardian. The 12 charities, which together raised more than £16m from the public, and spent millions more official aid from government, saved lives and eased suffering, says...