Word: belgians
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BRUSSELS: A Belgian commission concluded that incompetent and perhaps even complicit police enabled convicted child rapist Marc Dutroux and eight others to kidnap and kill at least five girls in 1992. The probe cited a long list of police and judicial blunders, noting that police twice heard girl's voices while searching Dutroux's cellar but did not realize children were imprisoned there. Police also accepted Dutroux's explanation that the construction they saw was for a new drainage system, when in fact he was creating cells to house his kidnap victims. Prosecutors were criticized for taking a lax approach...
...excesses of Mobutu's corruption might be comical were it not for the tragic consequences his despotism has wreaked upon his countrymen. While Mobutu lounged in his Belgian castle, a Peace Corps survey in 1980 revealed that in a nation that owns one-quarter of the world's diamonds, malnutrition was killing more than one-third of the Zairian population. The U.S. was a key player among the Western nations that helped line Mobutu's coffers. The current overtures of China to the Western marketplace confront the global community with a similar challenge. Let's hope that Washington does...
...ubermensches (and uberfraus) may be all the rage in the United States, in Europe they are used mostly for satirical purposes. Only in England does the serious superhero thrive, in incarnations like "Judge Dredd," found in the pages of adult comic weeklies like 2000 A.D. or Warriors. French and Belgian takes on the superhero yield either goofy results, like "Superdupont" by Gotlib and Jacques Lob, or satiric ones, as in the Italian "Ranxerox," a buffed-up, tank-top wearing, green-lipsticked, utterly psychotic superhero who bounces around on all fours with wires trailing out of his head...
...nephew of the first wife of North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il, was reported to be brain-dead after two gunmen shot him in the head outside a friend's apartment Saturday. Police found two shells at the site from the weapon of choice for North Korean agents, a Belgian Browning pistol. While Seoul's response to Lee's death has been remarkably understated, possibilities for South Korea to get some political revenge might be just around the corner. Seoul newspapers report that Hwang has given the CIA a list of five to seven other high-ranking North Korean functionaries...
...uniformed men filmed by television crews last week alongside Zairian soldiers actually are technicians hired by Zaire to service the army's equipment. But TIME's Peter Graff reports that diplomatic sources have confirmed that the 280 or so "white guys with guns" are indeed mercenaries, led by a Belgian named Christian Taverniers. Taverniers told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on Monday that his group had "not yet fired a single shot," despite Kinshasa's claims that it had retaken the town of Walikale before the weekend. Activity on the current front, some 500 km of dense jungle between Kinshasa...