Top UN official in Afghanistan admits fraud tainted election

With days to go until the final results of the August Afghanistan elections, Kai Eide the head of the UN mission in Kabul acknowledged, yesterday, that “widespread fraud” had marred Afghanistan’s presidential election. The report of a fraud investigation is due in the coming days run by the Election Complaints Commission, a watchdog led by non-Afghan staff. Around 10% of the 3,498 ballot boxes regarded as suspicious have been inspected by election staff looking for signs of irregularities.

Militants attack Pakistani army base

Ten men disguised as soldiers carried out a 22-hour raid on Pakistan’s military headquarters, known as GHQ. On attack five of the militants died, while the remainder held 45 hostages over the weekend. At 6am yesterday the Services Group commandos attacked the besieged building leaving only one surviving militia member. Three hostages, two of them civilians, and two soldiers were killed. It was the third attack of the week. On Friday a bomb in central Peshawar killed 53 people and last Monday a suicide attacker killed five staff in a UN building.

Call to legalise South Africa’s sex trade

It is estimated that 50% of South Africa’s sex workers are HIV positive, which raised growing concern for South Africa to legalise prostitution before next year’s World Cup. With millions of fans visiting South Africa during the World Cup in order to decrease the chance of HIV infection health specialists are calling for registering prostitutes and screening them for the virus. Professor Ian Sanne, head of the clinical HIV research unit at Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University argues that South Africans should use the World Cup as a platform to raise awareness on the need for testing, while decriminalising prostitution can start to help women who’ve been abused and brutalised from a young age. But the issue is hugely contentious in a country where the sex trade is regarded as immoral and unacceptable.

US Drug firm to be sued by Haemophiliacs with HIV

Haemophiliacs in Taiwan and Hong Kong have been given permission to sue a multi-national drugs firm in the US over allegations that they contracted HIV. Cutter made a product called Koate, given to haemophiliacs to enable their blood to clot in the event of an injury. Documents in the court case brought on behalf of the Taiwanese haemophiliacs showed that some of the donated blood used to make the drug came from paid prisoners. Prisons had exceptionally high levels of inmates with HIV. In the 1980s, once it was recognised that HIV was blood-borne, Cutter's executives, it is alleged, decided to carry on supplying the Far East regardless. A copy of Cutter's 1985 Far East region marketing plan suggests that the strategy was to offload stocks of Koate before the "hysteria over Aids" set in and caused a slump in sales.

Sri Lanka on the edge of ‘humanitarian disaster’

As the monsoon season arrives, tens of thousands of detained refugees’, from the war in Sri Lanka, lives are at risk, according to an internal United Nations document. The UN believes that about 66,000 people held in the Menik Farm internment camp face a humanitarian disaster when the rains start. Officials have urged the government to move those whose tents are most likely to be flooded by a mixture of rain and sewage which will cause a plethora of disease. According to the OCHA report, 253,567 people are interned in the main camps, with another 3,358 in transit camps and 1,984 in hospitals. Reports from people released from the camps, and those still inside, suggest conditions remain difficult, with limited access to water and good sanitation.

Young Kenyans hired by Somalia to fight Islamist rebels

Reports in the local media said that hundredrs of young Kenyans between 18 and 30 were being offered salaries of at least £250 a month to join Somalia’s President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed's forces to fight Islamist rebels. Mohamed Gabow, the mayor of Garissa, said more than 170 Kenyan Somalis had been transported at night to an army camp in Mombasa. Local human rights activists said as many as 300 men had been recruited, with some already deployed to Somalia. Local leaders, as well as the Council of Imans and Preachers of Kenya, have demanded an explanation from the Kenyan government.

The world’s most persecuted refugees: Burma's exiled Muslims

About 3,000 Rohingya families are awaiting deportation in Saudi prisons, with nowhere to go. Thousands of Burmese Muslims, called Rohingyas, were offered a safe haven in Saudi Arabia by the late King Faisal, but with the change in monarch the rules changed too. Women and children are held in separate prisons nearby to the men’s prisons and the only contact the men have with their wives and children is through mobile phones. The Burmese government have consistently refused to recognise the Rohingyas as citizens, so instead they survive as second class human beings in Mecca’s slums, many marry off their young (sometimes underage) daughters to old and sick Saudis in the hope of getting "official favours".