Uneasy Sarkozy sees angry workers turn to bossnapping
PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy received a bullet in the post last week with a letter threatening to kill him. Meanwhile, several executives, including three Britons, were locked in their offices by workers in protest against redundancies.
France is in a rebellious mood and an outbreak of “bossnapping” is just one symptom. The traditional preference for direct action over debate produced rioting in Strasbourg and Corsica, in which buildings were set ablaze by the mob.
Britain has bloody hands in Zimbabwe
Donald Trelford exposed Robert Mugabe's murderous methods 25 years ago, but couldn't persuade Whitehall to intervene
Sunday, 12 April 2009
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DESMOND KWANDE /AFP /GETTY IMAGES
A family near Harare bury a relative during the cholera epidemic that swept the country last December after hospitals were closed through shortages of staff and medicine
ENLARGEThe baby was already dead, but the crowd weren't to know that. They gasped in horror as the soldier held it aloft and declared: "This is what will happen to your babies if you hide dissidents." Then he dropped the tiny corpse in the dust. That was Brigadier Phiri, known as Black Jesus, notorious head of the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe Army, whose mission was to "cleanse" Matabeleland of dissidents.
There were no dangerous dissidents left, as his soldiers well knew, since the civil war had ended some years before. The myth provided them with an excuse to beat and torture villagers for refusing to reveal the whereabouts of the so-called insurgents. But, in reality, it was to intimidate and subdue the Ndebele tribe for supporting Joshua Nkomo, who had been Robert Mugabe's opponent at the general election before independence in 1980, four years previously. In 1987, after up to 400,000 of his people had been murdered in the pogrom that became known as the Gukurahundi ("the wind that blows away the chaff after harvest"), Nkomo gave in and merged his party with Mugabe's Zanu-PF.
It was 25 years ago this month that I stumbled on the first direct evidence that Mugabe was a monster who would destroy his own people to preserve his hold on power. It seems extraordinary that it took nearly a quarter of a century for the world to catch on.
If Ireland still controlled the levers of economic policy, it would have slashed interest rates to near zero to prevent a property collapse from destroying the banking system. The Irish central bank would be a founder member of the "money printing" club, leading the way towards quantitative easing a l'outrance. Irish bond yields would not be soaring into the stratosphere. The central bank would be crushing the yields with a sledge-hammer, just as the Fed and the Bank of England are crushing yields on US Treasuries and giltsIreland is ECB's sacrifical lamb to satisfy German inflation demands
Put bluntly, Ireland is being forced to roll back the welfare state and tighten fiscal policy in the midst of a savage economic contraction in order to uphold the deflation orthodoxies of Europe's monetary union.
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