South African former minister claims he doesn't know which Gupta brother offered him millions and ministry Former South African deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas has thrown 'State Capture' hearings into confusion by admitting he didn't know who offered him a huge bribe and promotion. Jonas told Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo's commission of inquiry on Friday he only recognised the man he claimed to have met on 23 October 2015 as one of the three Gupta brothers “from media reports.” The commission's key witness claimed the mystery man, who did not identify himself, offered him a 600 million Rand (£33 million) bribe and his then-boss, finance minster Nhlanhla Nene's job – if he would help the family group raise its share of government and parastatal enterprise contracts. “I had not previously met any of the Gupta brothers, but I recognised him... from media reports,” said Jonas in his statement. “At the time, I did not know his name as he...

Nicaragua's foreign minister has accused the continent's human rights body of undermining its claimed neutrality and violating the regional bloc's charter with a “biased and politicised” report on months of violent anti-government protests. Minister for International Policy and Affairs Siddharta Marin's office denounced the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) final report in a statement late on Saturday night. It said the commission, a wing of the Washington DC-based Organisation of American States (OAS), had joined a “political and media campaign of lies, misrepresentation, epithets and stigmatization” against Daniel Ortega's Sandinista government. The statement accused the IACHR of ignoring documentary evidence presented by the government in favour of “audio-visual information and testimonies edited and manipulated by the perpetrators” of the “attempted coup.” The ministry said the commission “used biased criteria” and avoided passing judgem...

Syrian troops and allies have opened several new fronts and won a string of victories against terrorists despite Saturday's missile raid by the Western powers. On Thursday night the Syrian Arab Army and allied Palestinian refugee militia launched an offensive against Islamic State (ISIS) and the al-Qaida affiliated Nusra Front in Yarmouk, a southern suburb of Damascus, Lebanon's Al Masdar News reported .  That was after the extremists rejected an offer of safe passage for them and their families to parts of the country still held by their fellows. The official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said only that air strikes had been launched against the two groups in al-Hajar al-Aswad, a neighbouring district to Yarmouk in the last terrorist-occupied area of the capital. But claimed video footage of the fighting emerged on social media. Foreign-backed sectarians seized the heavily urbanised Palestinian refugee camp since soon after the attempted 2011 coup against the gover...

Assad defies NATO after medical centre bombed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says his country no longer fear NATO after Saturday's failed cruise missile attack by the combined forces of the western powers. Mr Assad told a visiting delegation of Russian MPs his country was “no longer afraid of NATO” after Syria's 30-year-old Russian-made air defences shot down around around 70 per cent of the incoming missiles, with no hits scored on military bases. “ According to the president's point of view, this was aggression and we share this position,” State Duma member Sergei Zheleznyak said, according to Sputnik International . “He has highly appreciated Russian weapons, which showed supremacy over the arms of the aggressors.” The US, Britain and France claimed they hit a chemical weapons facility in the attack in the small hours of Saturday morning. But the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported the target was the Pharmaceutical and Chemical Industries Research Ins...

US President Donald Trump left his European allies high and dry on Thursday as he signalled a last-minute swerve away from bombing Syria. British Prime Minister Theresa May, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were left looking like turkeys after Mr Trump blinked in his game of chicken with Russia. “Never said when an attack on Syria would take place,” Mr Trump tweeted early on Thursday morning, Washington time. “Could be very soon or not so soon at all!” The three European leaders had backed military action over dubious claims ― by the US-British funded and founded 'White Helmets' ― of a chemical weapons attack on the Army of Islam terrorist group's stronghold in Douma, a few miles northeast of the capital Damascus. In the same tweet, Mr Trump abruptly shifted focus to the near-total defeat of Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, in which Syrian, Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah forces played a leading role. “In any eve...

Chemical weapons claims, US threats and Israeli air raids failed to halt the liberation of Syria's Douma from Western-backed extremists on Monday. Army of Islam gunmen continued their withdrawal from the town in the East Ghouta region, just northeast of the capital Damascus yesterday, even as US President Donald Trump raised the spectre of a repeat of last year's cruise missile attack. A deal struck on Sunday to evacuate the insurgent group from Douma to the Turkish-occupied border town of Jarabulus, north of Aleppo, was holding. The national SANA news agency reported that 41 buses carrying hundreds of gunmen and their families left on Monday through a ceasefire corridor. A government source said hostages held for years by the Army of Islam ― often in cages as human shields ― would be freed by tonight. The first busload of mostly women and children left the terrorist stronghold about 11pm on Sunday night, a SANA reporter confirmed . A local source in Douma told Leb...

The trial of South Africa's ex-president Jacob Zuma was postponed for two months on Friday pending his legal challenge to the resurrection of decade-old corruption charges. Outside the Durban High Court, thousands of Mr Zuma's supporters from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and other organisations brought the Indian Ocean port city to a standstill. Zuma supporters rally around a stage set up outside the Durban High Court The ANC Women's League, Youth League and Umkhonto we Sizwe Veterans' Association were present, along with the Black land First Campaign, National Interfaith Council of South Africa, the Commission for Religious Affairs. Revellers wore ANC t-shirts and other merchandise in defiance of warnings by Police Minister Bheki Cele Former minister Des van Rooyen and Eastern Cape ANC leader Andile Lungisa accompanied Mr Zuma to the doors of the court. Inside he sat smiling a few feet apart from Christine Guerrier, a representative of Fre...

An overnight vigil in support of beleaguered South African ex-president Jacob Zuma turned into a festival of song and dance on Thursday night. Durban's Albert Park reverberated to the "Hands Off Zuma" rally, initially dubbed a vigil and "mother of all prayers" for the popular former leader who faced trial on 16 corruption charges at the city's High Court on Friday morning. Those charges relate to allege kickbacks from the mammoth 1998 arms deal, struck before Mr Zuma was even a member of the national government. His supporters have called the reinstatement of the charges, which were thrown out of court in 2008 and finally dropped in 2009, a witch-hunt orchestrated by "White Monopoly Capital," common parlance for neo-colonial Western business interests looking to maintain their dominance of the South African economy. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) pressured Mr Zuma to resign in February, just over a year ahead  of scheduled electi...

Momentum has been building this week for a mass overnight vigil and protest in support of South Africa's sacked president Jacob Zuma when he faces trial on decades-old corruption charges this Friday. Loyal members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) will converge on the Indian Ocean port of Durban, the capital of Mr Zuma's home province of KwaZulu Natal, on Thursday for an overnight vigil, followed by an early morning “Hands Off Zuma” march from three protest camps to the High Court. Rehearsals for Friday's protest march earlier this week National organisations and rank-and-file ANC cadres have pledged support for the popular former president, whose nicknames include Msholozi (his clan name), Nxamalala (his birthplace), uBaba (our father) and Mshini Wami (Bring Me My Machine Gun), the struggle song with which Mr Zuma drives rallies wild. They include the Black Land First campaign, the National Interfaith Council of South Africa, the Commission for Reli...

VENEZUELA hit back on Thursday night after the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened a probe and MEPs ordered new sanctions. Venezuelan security officials may soon have the dubious distinction of being the first non-Africans bounced through the notorious imperialist kangaroo court in The Hague following Thursday’s announcement by ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. A Venezuelan Foreign Ministry statement rejected the move, saying it came as a surprise with no previous official communication from Ms Bensouda. Ms Bensouda said the preliminary investigation will look into MUD claims the security forces "frequently used excessive force to disperse and put down demonstrations," last year and abused some detained opposition members. Four months of opposition regime-change violence from April last year left 124 people dead, including several burned alive on the mere suspicion of being government supporters. The Gambian lawyer’s own country’s exit from the ICC was halted b...

VENEZUELAN Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza condemned the EU's “shameful” sanctioning of seven top officials on Monday as proof of Brussels' “subordination” to Washington.  Mr Arreaza said Venezuela rejected the measures imposed “in an illegal and unilateral manner,” which “violate the fundamental precepts of the UN Charter and are intended to exercise a gross interference in the internal affairs of our country.” He said the move indicated an “erratic and interventionist policy towards our country” which recalled the “colonialist manoeuvres of ancient empires, expelled from our America 200 years ago by the courage and freedom-loving will of our peoples.” The foreign minister said the “obsessive conduct towards Venzuela” was turning the EU into “an instrument at the service of the imperialist intents of the US government.” Earlier on Monday, unelected EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini's office announced the sanctions, claiming the seven were "involved ...

CORRUPT Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht funded opposition parties in Venezuela and elsewhere, its former CEO told Peruvian prosecutors on Wednesday. Marcelo Odebrecht told a hearing the corporation paid off the Venezuelan Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) coalition and other opposition parties across the continent to dissuade them from challenging corruptly-awarded contracts. “Our intention was to support many candidates of the opposition, even knowing that they would not be elected,” he said. “We supported them in some way because the opposition can also create problems.” “One way to create a network is through support,” Mr Odebrecht added. “The way to avoid the opposition was precisely to attend to its campaign needs.” Court documents show the corporation paid more than £70 million to Venezuelan “government officials and intermediaries” between 2006 and 2015. Last June former Odebrecht Venezuela director Euzenando Azevedo confessed to depositing money in a privat...

SOLIDARITY campaigners attacked a former Venezuelan minister’s unprecedented call for foreign military invasion to end a claimed “famine” yesterday. Britain’s Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC) slammed Ricardo Hausmann for his article entitled “ D-Day Venezuela ”, published on Tuesday by the Czech-based Project Syndicate website — funded by regime-change NGO kingpin George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The Harvard University professor and former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank claimed Venezuela’s economic woes — which the government blames on a US-directed economic war and black market spivs — had created a “famine.” The United Socialist Party (PSUV) government has moved to reduce the problems poor Venezuelans have in buying food by supplying monthly subsidised food parcels to all households at a price equivalent to a few pounds. Mr Hausmann equated the situation to that in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in 1944-45, when around 20,000 people died of m...