KwaZulu-Natal police arrested a man after he allegedly raped an 11-year-old girl at her home in the Sankonshe area in Mpumalanga early on Thursday morning.
Archive for March, 2002
A team of consultants, hired at a cost of R15-million to conduct a
massive head-count of KwaZulu-Natal’s teachers, pupils and schools, is
to be investigated by other consultants for their shoddy work.
The grisly discovery of 17 bodies buried in a shallow mass grave on the
KwaZulu-Natal South Coast was “just the tip of the iceberg”, say
consultants who warned of a “health and environmental disaster” several
weeks ago.
Pieter Pieterse, 66, author and Maak ‘n Las television presenter, was
found dead at his Komatipoort, Mpumalanga home on Thursday afternoon,
police said.
Let’s be honest for a moment here. You, gentle reader, have probably cheated on a report at least once in your life. A book report cribbed from the book in question’s dust jacket? An essay loosely copied from someone else? A colleague’s memo sent out under your own name? Hey, it happens. These are generally unimportant things.
But what happens when reports on really important things are fudged? Things related to, say, the ability to destroy the world? And what if the dishonest people aren’t schoolchildren or the co-worker who always steals your pencils? What if they’re senior US government officials, respected scientists and captains of industry?
The reports in question purport to prove that the suspiciously phallic Son of Star Wars defence system works. It indeed appears capable of intercepting enemy missiles and destroying them before they reach US soil. And so another wasted $8.3 billion goes into the coffers of the friends and family of the American oligarchy.
But now the U.S. Congress’s General Accounting Office are investigating allegations of fraud in the scientific results. TRW and Boeing might have altered data clearly showing that the defence system cannot distinguish between real missiles and decoys. Seconds have been stripped from detailed flight reports: only 18 out of 60 seconds remained in one instance.
MIT’s professor Theodore Postol examined some of the data, and found that the interceptor’s “attention was hopping almost randomly from one target to another”. Those conducting the experiment “simply chose those periods when [the interceptor] happened to be looking at the right target”. The Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Service (DCIS) concluded that the discrimination technology “cannot and will not meet the contract requirements” and that TRW was willing to repeatedly falsify documents submitted to the United States on this program.”
To date no decision has been reached on whether anyone will be prosecuted for duping the American public into paying for an unworkable system. And development on this very expensive and highly dangerous lemon goes on.
Barbara Rosenberg believes that the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States might have been a derailed CIA experiment. And as far as crackpots go, Dr Barbara Rosenberg has pretty good bona fides. She’s director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Chemical and Biological Weapons Program.
Four years ago, the CIA commissioned a study on the likely impact of anthrax sent through the mail. On the BBC’s Newsnight Rosenberg stated: “Some very expert field person would have been given this job and it would have been left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out. The result might have been a project gone badly awry if he decided to use it for his own purposes and target the media and the Senate for his own motives as not intended by the government project.”
The CIA denies this. Their man in charge of the 1998 study was Dr William Capers Patrick, who adds that he “may have met the person behind the attack”, though. “Possibly, possibly, I could have talked to these people. But it would have been within the context of their having a need to know.”
The UK Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs have released findings that cannabis “is not associated with major health problems for the individual or society”. The drug, which can be psychologically addictive, isn’t nearly as addictive as alcohol or cigarettes. And for “healthy young people, cannabis is even said to have a similar effect on the heart as exercise”.
A former investigator who probed People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) cases testified in the Cape High Court on Monday about death
threats he had received.
Parkview detectives were on Monday appealing for help in identifying the victims of a weekend double-murder at Johannesburg’s popular Emmarentia Dam.
The African National Congress’s national working committee concluded its meeting in Johannesburg on Monday night without discussing the HIV/Aids issue, ANC representative Smuts Ngonyama said.
“It was an ordinary ANC meeting [during] which we discussed (among others) the re-alignment of the structures of the party and preparations for the coming national executive committee meeting,” he said after the meeting. “Madiba (Nelson Mandela) attended the meeting and nothing about Aids was discussed.”
Lovely digital art to take your mind off the doldrums.
A 23-year-old man has been arrested for the rape and sodomy of baby
Tshepang at the age of nine months in October last year, police
reported on Thursday.
Land invaders in Mpumalanga’s deep rural area of Nkomazi are not impoverished squatters seeking a spot of earth on which to build a shack. Instead, they’re teachers and taxi bosses who have illegally demarcated land earmarked for a housing project in Bosfontein, south of Malelane, and are selling stands for as little as R150.
A graphic novel by Robert Crumb. This is the closest most of you will
ever get to heaven, so you might as well surf and enjoy it while you
can.
More than 2 800 pornographic images, of which 250 were child
pornography, were found on the computer of a church elder charged with
indecently assaulting a young girl, a Welkom court has heard.
