He was an engineer who had designed a three-wheel van for Raleigh in

He was an engineer who had designed a three-wheel van for Raleigh in Nottingham. Raleigh decided it wanted to concentrate on bicycles, so Mr Williams bought the components for the van and set up in his garden workshop in Tamworth, in the West Midlands. That’s the trouble with Iranians: they’ve never really grasped the true-blue Ocker spirit that takes over a man when he’s in the Outback.. ONCE upon a time, more than 60 years ago, there was a man called Tom Lawrence Williams. The Australian Foreign Ministry rather stiffly agreed that he was indeed in the area, but that, bored with the main highway, he decided to take ”a scenic route” along a river bed parallel to the road, where he became bogged down and had to ask for help at a local salt mine. IRANIAN newspapers are calling for the expulsion of the Australian ambassador saying he drove to a military zone in the desert east of Tehran on a spying mission.

”Ah, we too are very cruel to animals in our own small way,” the Abyssinians, hands on their hearts, assured their visitors.. Except they got it slightly wrong, and sent a senior policeman frequently accused of being a leading torturer himself. Yousfi Kadouri used to run the notorious Derb Moulay Cherif centre in Casablanca where hundreds of prisoners are said to have been tortured. It’s a bit like Evelyn Waugh’s fictional Abyssinians responding to some visiting English ladies much concerned about cruelty to animals.

”If there were no war there, why, Africa could be a – a – why, it could be a billion-dollar vacationland!”. IT was good of Morocco to send a delegate to a meeting of the UN committee on torture in Geneva last week. In other words, because black people are a minority in America, they are a minority everywhere – even when they’re hugely in the majority, as in South Africa. But America has always been eccentric, or ethnocentric, in its perceptions of Africa. Ronald Reagan once expatiated thus on the wars in Angola and Mozambique: ”It’s too bad,” he said. Why? USAid says that its money must now be given to ”minority-led” groups. In South Africa, for example, Black Sash, the group of mostly white women who’ve spent 40 years fighting apartheid, last week were refused their usual grant for their welfare work among blacks.

This, however, should mean fewer of the absurdities attached to US aid. But the prosecution has appealed, and the old Nazi’s case is now before Cornelius Prittwitz, a liberal lawyer brought in from the west as professor of law at Rostock University in east Germany, and an appeal judge on the bench of the supreme regional court.Professor Prittwitz, who is working to bring western law to people who have known only authoritarian regimes since 1933, said he was disturbed by the issues involved.No details of Piehl’s attempt to get out of prison have appeared in Germany. Amnesties and the quashing of convictions reduced the prison population of the East from 31,000 in October 1989 to just 3,262 in January 1992.Piehl, who is 79, has won the first round of his court battle to join the list of rehabilitated offenders. The legal revolution has led to jails being emptied and then closed, the introduction of liberal laws and the sacking of thousands of East German lawyers, judges, police and prison officers who were tainted by association with the GDR.After unification, all those who could show that they were political prisoners – such as East Germans jailed for trying to escape over the Berlin Wall – or that they were the victims of sentences which were excessively severe by the standards of the west, have been freed. Instead, Piehl alleges that his actions might not have led to a war crimes conviction if his 1981 trial had been heard in a West German court rather than Saxony in the East.The appeal is potentially the most controversial case to emerge from the sweeping changes brought about by West Germany’s abolition of the East’s criminal justice system. A NAZI war criminal jailed for life by the old East German regime could be freed by the courts of the new Germany. Johannes Piehl, who commanded a paramilitary police battalion which killed hundreds of Jewish and Polish partisans in the Second World War, is attempting to escape from a life sentence by using a law designed to quash the convictions of political prisoners of communist East Germany.
No one doubts he was involved in large-scale killing He is not claiming he is a victim of mistaken identity.

The struggle for America’s ideological soul, however, will be a long one.(Photographs omitted). A watch retrieved from the rubble of Hiroshima, its hands frozen at the time of the blast, considered too pro-Japanese by some veterans, may even be reinstated to the exhibition, beside a more prominent record of the torture of PoWs by Japanese soldiers in Asia. ”It’s absurd to think we can go back to 19th century standards and turn our back on women in history or pretend that people who are not of European descent have no history.”Doubtless the arguments over the Enola Gay will be ironed out and the exhibition will open on time. History has been evolving and the way it has been taught has been evolving and all of us are working more and more in multi-cultural classrooms,” she counters. Can’t you?”The notion of a leftist, politically-correct plot elicits a disgusted laugh from Michele Forman, a school teacher in Vermont, who helped compile the standards ”That’s just totally false. Asked about the reference to the Olmec civilisation, he offers no apology.