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New York Times
07-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Why Are Police Officers in South Africa Torturing People?
It's hard to imagine that a brutal torture method used by South Africa's racist white rulers during apartheid would still be practiced in the nation that looks to Nelson Mandela, one of the world's most lauded human rights leaders, as a guiding light. But The New York Times has found that, three decades after apartheid ended, a form of suffocation torture called 'tubing' has quietly persisted among South African police, despite laws designed to eliminate it. In its original form, tubing involved officers tightly pulling a piece of tire tube over the nose and mouth. Today it is typically done by pulling a plastic bag over the head. In collaboration with Viewfinder, a South African journalism nonprofit that reports on police misconduct, The Times analyzed tens of thousands of complaints against the police and identified about 1,700 allegations of tubing over an 11-year period. Experts say the actual number is probably higher, as most victims do not file complaints. The findings in this first-of-its-kind data analysis show that a government led by freedom fighters who once helped liberate Black South Africans from apartheid is now overseeing a police force that tortures them. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
C*A*U*G*H*T, review: tiring hostage comedy tries to hit too many targets
Shall we start with the title? C*A*U*G*H*T (ITVX) begs for attention through the medium of capitals and asterisks. Imagine if everyone made their show look like a finicky password. S/T\R/I!C\T/L\Y. ?QUESTION? ?TIME?. B@K£ ŒUF. It would get irritating in a heartbeat. C*A*U*G*H*T doesn't require typography to achieve that outcome. Originally scheduled to air in October 2023, but postponed in the wake of the October 7 attack, this is that trickiest of balancing acts: a no-holds-barred comedy about soldiers being taken hostage by the terrorist rebels of a small unrecognised nation. There are d--k pics and SMGs, cold-blooded slaughter and a man sucking out a bullet amusingly lodged in his wounded pal's anus. On the drawing board, the script no doubt throbbed and swaggered with hilarity. Most of the action is set on a tropical island of Behati-Prinsloo where four Aussie soldiers have been dropped on a black ops mission to wipe the phone of the island's princess. They are soon captured by indeterminately Asian freedom fighters and pleading for their lives. 'Killing Australian could be a public relations disaster for us,' reasons a rebel. 'Everybody loves Australians. Nobody knows why.' A geopolitical incident is soon the talk of the international airwaves. The joke is that the soldiers, seemingly in danger, really collaborate with their captors by making a fake hostage video. Then the US gets involved, rendering this a most strange Australian-American hybrid. Almost every male Aussie here – soldier, politician, broadcaster – is some form of idiot. The female characters are all feistier and, of necessity in this patriarchy of plonkers, cannier. The US is mainly represented by Sean Penn playing Sean Penn as a narcissistic bully who gets caught up in the hostages' story. It's an arms race of self-parody. In all this random oddness, there's even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo for Susan Sarandon. Penn does deliver one extremely funny punchline about Madonna, to whom, once upon a time, he was married. But you have to slog through to the end of the fifth episode for this reward. And it jostles for attention in a dense thicket of chuck-in-anything, broad-brushstroke satire on masculinity, ethnicity, diplomacy, celebrity, news media, action movies, plus a whole anthology of Aussie in-jokes about a murderous dingo and a murdered koala, 'The Shark', 'The Thorpedo' and the defensible merits of early Mel Gibson. As for the plot, it hops along in six half-hour increments. Interest in the four hostages, as they once again barter to save their skins, wanes long before their fate is revealed. As the scriptwriters might put it, it's all ****.
Wall Street Journal
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
There's a Doctrine in the House—Call It Mater-Realism
Along with the big house and a legacy, every self-respecting president likes to have a doctrine. Since James Monroe gave his name to one, most presidents have sought to codify formally or informally their engagement with the world beyond U.S. shores into a set of principles that provides a blueprint for a coherent foreign policy. (Teddy Roosevelt had to make do with a corollary rather than a full doctrine, but that didn't stop him from being among the more consequential presidents.) Presidential doctrine is both rhetorical and empirical, carefully crafted in speeches that capture the administration's intentions and aspirations, and executed in presidential action. In his 1985 State of the Union address, Ronald Reagan pithily captured his doctrine with the claim that 'Support for freedom fighters is self-defense.' He exemplified it with active assistance to anticommunists from Kabul to Managua.
