A presidential spokesman said a decision would be taken before the end of the week

A presidential spokesman said a decision would be taken before the end of the week.Mr Boesak was already reeling from allegations that his foundation misused funds donated by the American singer, Paul Simon, to a charity for child victims of apartheid. The Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, said on Monday that he had called in police after preliminary investigations had shown no record of 423,000 rand (£76,500) donated by Simon to the Children’s Trust, administered by the Foundation for Peace and Justice.Late last year, Danchurch Aid and two other funding organisations in Sweden and Norway engaged a Johannesburg legal firm to examine the use of 2.7m rand donated to Mr Boesak’s foundation. The controversial former church leader “enriched himself substantially” at the expense of his Foundation for Peace and Justice, according to the conclusions of the inquiry, conducted by a Johannesburg legal firm for the Danish donor organisation, Danchurch Aid.
Mr Boesak’s UN posting was put on ice by President Nelson Mandela last month pending the conclusion of the inquiry. Cape Town (AFP) – South Africa’s ambassador-designate to the United Nations in Geneva, Allan Boesak, was found by a legal inquiry yesterday to have misappropriated money given to his aid agency by Scandinavian donors, throwing his posting into fur ther doubt.

The wardens and guards, as well as the prisoners, are dead against it.”Mr Stratton, who spent eight years in a Los Angeles jail for marijuana smuggling, said cigarettes were used as currency to pay “for everything from sexual favours, to having your cell cleaned, to gambling. “We wouldn’t give them a shot of whisky or cocaine so I doubt we’d give them a cigarette.”In parts of New York state, guards have taken to giving prisoners carrots and celery sticks twice a day to calm thenerves of those forced abruptly to kick the habit. If the vegetable surrogates fail to cure the nicotine addiction and prisoners are caughtsmoking they face punishment, usually loss of privileges, such as receiving one celery stick instead of two.”This is completely off the wall,” said Richard Stratton, editor of Prison Life, a magazine written by prisoners and ex- prisoners “All it does is createmore strife inside the prisons. The Gema’a should not be the only group to control street opinion. At the moment, the citizen here is only exposed to two points of view, the government and the religious groups.”Then, there is what Mr Khafagy calls the cultural problem. “At the moment, we have the `desert’ culture of the religious groups and what I call the `petrol’ culture of the West and its television programmes that the state shows us.”But the desert culture is against enlightenment, which refuses anything logical, which refuses the rationality of the mind The `petrol’ culture is degenerate. We need different expressions of view on the streets so there will be political dynamism.

Elections are rigged, so opposition people here can’t participate in local councils The state is an unreal democracy. Our political parties in Egypt are unable to hold public meetings. This is good soil for violence and extremism.”Then, there is the political aspect. All the talk ofgovernment investments in Upper Egypt is propaganda. Alexandria gets 13.6 per cent, double all Upper Egypt, which contains eight governorships. “Of our country’s budget, 49 per cent goes to Cairo but only 6.8 per cent to upper Egypt.

Since then, about 145 people have died in Mallawi and its surrounding villages.”There are three aspects to our crisis,” Mr Khafagy said. The Islamists announced in the town mosques that they would “undertake operations in retribution”. Again, testimony was underlined by music – wistful bits of Schumann for childhood innocence, replaced by loud thrumming for the onset of war, all overlaid by tapes of marching boots.The real difficulty here was with the participants – Marie, a Belgian woman who had spent most of her childhood on the run, and her resentful, unloved daughter. The idea was that by getting the daughter to understand what her mother had been through, they could mend their relationship. You could see the kind of moving programme the producers hoped to get out of the encounter. Instead, we heard sniping and competitive psychobabble – the mother sounding almost triumphant as she demanded of her daughter, “Do you feel the loneliness of that child?” This stood somewhere between soap opera and plain Oprah, and there are times when neither seems quite adequate..

“Criminals don’t make history, only news,” says a character in Criminals in Love. Perhaps not, but they make plenty of novels, films and plays – so many in fact that they must now come tooled-up with ironic quotation marks So it is here. That thetheorist, William (Tim Preece), is a tramp who turns out to be a sage, might give you just some idea what a knowing tale of metamorphosis George F Walker’s 1984 play is But it is also a romance. Junior and Gail could be the boy and girl fleeing forces of darkness in any number of children’s stories, except that when we meet them Junior’s head is deep under Gail’s sweater. They are, as played by newcomers George Sida andEve Steele, an attractively sparky pair of naifs who become tied into an obscure plot involving theft and bombs, courtesy of Junior’s comically inept but still convincingly vicious father Henry (Ian Mercer). The plot is supposedly masterminded by Henry’s brother, Richie, but since he never appears, it is driven by his black wife, Wineva (Ellen Thomas), who eventually reveals herself as an incendiary revolutionary of the class of ‘68.