A "barbaric" video of white South African students forcing black university workers to eat meat contaminated with urine caused widespread outrage and protests on Wednesday.
Four University of the Free State students filmed themselves drinking in a bar and then one of them urinating into a stew before forcing five black staff members, four of them women, to eat it at their dormitory on the Bloemfontein campus accompanied by shouts of "take it, take it."
The women can be seen on their knees eating the stew from metal cups and then spitting it out in disgust. They were also forced to perform athletic tasks.
The video was made in September, apparently in protest at the university's racial equality policy, but has only now made public.
Two of the students have been expelled and the other two have already completed their studies, but all now face criminal charges after state prosecutors met university authorities yesterday to discuss the case.
The public airing of the film has added to rising racial tensions following riots on the campus last week over the integration program at the university, which has remained overwhelmingly white even after the end of apartheid.
The ruling African National Congress's youth league described the video as "barbaric."
Some predominantly white groups were also quick to denounce the video. The rightwing and mostly Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus condemned the "atrocities screened on a video."
A civil rights group linked to a mostly white trade union described the students actions as "inexcusable."
The university's rector, Frederick Fourie, told the BBC he was "extremely upset about the incident." However, South Africa's statutory human rights commission yesterday said it was investigating whether the university authorities "allow and condone violations of human rights."
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the