Femicide in South Africa: what can the government do?

24:01China has not been on the scene very long at all. The rate of growth and sophistication of their market or the level of increasing sophistication in their market has been truly mind-boggling. Far greater than any other country that I've been involved with.

24:16Minister for Women:Adam Armstrong and Dean Gerd. That report from Katie Watson in Australia. You're listening to NewsHour.

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25:16When you borrow on credit cards and take out a$1 ,200 car payment on a freaking Range Rover, you've destroyed your life, not the president. For the full interview, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you listen.

25:33Minister for Women:Welcome back to NewsHour. Police in Spain's North African territory of Ceuta have moved hundreds of migrants from the beaches to the port area where a tent city has been set up. There was a chaotic start to all this as the police began trying to sort this out. Thousands of migrants have been sleeping rough in Ceuta ever since 70 ,000 of them, mostly from Morocco, had flooded across the border in a mass surge in July. I'm joined in the studio by our global affairs reporter, Sebastian Usher. Sebastian, just take us through what happened today. Well, this was an operation started early in the morning.

26:10This is clearing a couple of beaches in Ceuta of around 3 ,000 migrants who are there, many of them very young, you know, teenagers, mostly men. And they've been living rough. There is a new tented area in the port about a kilometre away that they were being taken to, but limited spaces. So only about half of those on the beaches were actually able to get a space. And I think that is what led to the chaos and the disorder at the start. There was heavy police presence backed up by the Spanish military. They did at one point open fire with rubber bullets firing in the air. Also reports that police had used their batons.

26:47The operation did go ahead in the end and the people who could get into that tent are there now. The ones who didn't are back on the beach. And does Spain have a plan? That's a very good question. And it's a big question that's being asked to the prime minister, particularly Pedro Sanchez, for which this has not just been a humanitarian but a political crisis and his poll numbers are going down all the time based on this. He says he has a plan but that it's difficult because there has to be a proper process of each one of these migrants who are still there. Could be up to 10 ,000, maybe 13 ,000 still in Ceuta and this has got to be done properly and that is also complicated by the fact that some of them are minors so particular care has to be taken.

27:24As far as the people in Ceuta are concerned there's around 80 ,000 they want them out now. There's almost daily protests. The right wing opposition is making hay of this in Spain. And these images today of chaos in the early morning and the darkness, people rushing around, not seeming really to be any order has been used by them again as a stick to beat him with.

27:46Minister for Women:And in terms of, I mean, this is obviously something that happened initially a couple of months ago. What's been the reaction between Spain and Morocco? I mean, is there still considerable tension on how this all happened? That's an interesting question because essentially pretty much all the political parties in Spain, a police report that was issued, not long enough has happened, put the finger of responsibility pretty much on Morocco. And this has happened in the past when it seemed like Morocco has allowed large numbers of young Moroccans to go across to make things difficult for Spain at a particular juncture for a particular reason.

28:27Mr. Sanchez himself, the Prime Minister, has very, very much taken the position that's not the case. He's absolutely tried to stand firm. One assumes he doesn't want to make the situation worse from his perspective by having a big falling out with Morocco that this could happen again. But there certainly is a sense that Morocco has used this visitor tour that it could use again. And there's no sense at the moment that this particular incident, although it's winding down, is going to be the last.

28:55Minister for Women:Sebastian Usher, thank you very much for joining us here in the News Air studio. You with the BBC World Service and live from London, this is NewsHour with me, Tim Franks. And to northwest Pakistan now, where there's been an explosion at a mosque just as worshippers were gathering for Friday prayers. At least 16 people have been killed. Our correspondent, Carrie Davis, is in Islamabad. Carrie, what more can you tell us about these attacks? We did get some more information from a police official who said that the explosion had been caused because there was a vehicle that was heavily laden with explosives that then rammed into the mosque.

29:34This, of course, was on Friday afternoon. This was during Friday prayer time. So the mosque would have had many worshippers in it. We've been told by that police official that 11 civilians and five police officers died in the explosion. So we know at least that number have died, according to this official. They also told the BBC that there had been then an exchange of gunfire that had been continuing between the attackers and the security forces, and that six attackers had been killed in that exchange. Now, AP News Agency had also said that there was some, gave some further details too. They said that the mosque was actually close to a building that was housing police officials as well.

30:16And according to them, there were two gunmen that also attempted to enter that police compound. Now, the senior rescue officials have told the BBC that around 40 people were injured. There are images of people being carried away from the rubble, being put on people's backs just to get to the ambulances to be able to get some form of treatment. And at the moment, exactly who is behind this has not yet been confirmed. Right. Well, so we don't know who is behind it, but this is an area in northwest Pakistan where there have been a number of militant attacks, haven't there? So, yes. So in Kohat district where this happened, there are not regularly attacks, particularly not on this sort of scale.

30:57But in the districts around it, you're completely right. There are attacks quite regularly. And in Haiba Paktunkhwa, of course, which is this district that borders Afghanistan, there have often been militant attacks. Quite often, those are a bit closer to the border with Afghanistan. and in general across Pakistan we have seen an increase in militancy and an increase in the number of people killed by militant attacks not just in Khyber Pakdunkhwa but also in Balochistan down in the south of the country as well where we have seen separatist attacks so across Pakistan we have often seen an increase in militancy particularly in the course of the last few years.

31:31Minister for Women:Carrie Davis in Islamabad thank you very much for bringing us the latest and obviously if we have updates on that, we will bring them to you. Russians have started voting in their parliamentary elections, a vote that will take place across three days, across the 11 time zones of this vast country. It's one of the great displays of electoral democracy. Perhaps display is the key word here. Ahead of this first parliamentary election since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the authorities banned the only remaining anti-war party, Yabloko from the ballot. There will be a handful of other parties elected along with President Putin's United Russia, but they can generally be relied on to vote with the government on the big ticket issues.

32:16Minister for Women:So what should we be looking for? And what can we learn? And what indeed, may lie ahead for the people of Russia? We can speak now to Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. Nina, thank you very much for joining us again on News Air. First off, how important do you think these elections are for Vladimir Putin? Important, because Putin wants legitimacy. It's not in anybody's eyes, but in his own eyes. But also he wants legitimacy to say to when the united Russia, the party of power, his party is going to be elected across the board, which is predictable.

33:00he would say, well, here it is. This is our way to go and the way to go. We are at war and everybody is behind the flag and we had elections just to prove it. So that's one thing. But another thing, it's also a dig against Ukraine and Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, because Putin already spoke before saying, well, we are at war too, but we have elections and look at the Ukrainians, they don't. So there are a couple of things that are important, but Russians have really no choice. And the fact that, in fact, there are opposition parties that are bravely going is already a miracle.

33:42Minister for Women:So given that, given that it is as much as anything about signaling, what are the things that we should be, or maybe more importantly, Russians should be picking out of this? I mean, will it be down, for example, to turnout? Probably, to some degree, because clearly United Russia is going to win. And for example, you mentioned Yabloka. This is the only party that its official slogan is for peace and freedom, which is basically a crime. And in Putin's Russia, a lot of their observers are not being even let into polling stations. And one of the reasons they explained is that they don't have, I mean, I love that line.

34:23I don't know what it means, but it's remarkable. They don't have active electoral position, which makes no sense. So Russians are not looking for anything. Russians are just a lot of them who work for the government or work for some official organizations. They're being bust to those elections. So they have very little to gain from this. As for the West, it's very unclear what can be learned from that. But what it does to Putin is that it does give him his own legitimacy in his own eyes. And so anybody who says he's not, there is no elections, there's no elections, there's no democracy, he would say, no, we just had it.

35:05Minister for Women:One of the things, though, about, you know, free and fair elections, about just the whole difficult business of democracy and the free flow of information and holding people to account and all the rest of it, is that, you know, whether you like it or not, you do get a sense of what the people feel up to a point. Do you think that Vladimir Putin's government, that it does poll, that it does sort of try and work out what people are feeling? Or do you think that, I mean, you know, they may think, well, we've got a complete grip on the country. But do you think there is a sort of sense of we do need to take the polls because we may have big decisions to take, for example, over, you know, further mobilization?

35:51To some degree, but I don't think it's that matter. it matters that much anymore. And that's why, for example, Yabloka was allowed to run originally. They thought, okay, it's going to get 2 % and we are going to say everybody's for the war. And suddenly Yabloka started getting all this support. So they do polling, but it's not that, I mean, what's remarkable about these elections, usually before, during the elections, the state was sort of trying to please the people. There is nothing pleasing about this time. There's really no pleasing whatsoever. It's just, we're telling you what to do, we're telling you how to do it, and this is going to be this way.

36:26In fact, it's even more, the more people are against the war, the more Putin is going to push and say, no, we are fighting the war, and this is your job to fight it.

36:39Minister for Women:Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School University in New York City. Always good to have you on the program. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.

36:56Minister for Women:A centuries-old document that tells the story of the fall of the Aztec civilisation after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors is going on display in Mexico for the first time in more than 180 years. The manuscript is known as the Codex Azcatitlan, and it depicts cartoon-like scenes from the Spanish invasion. It's been in France's National Library since 1898, but it had already spent decades outside Mexico before that. It's widely considered one of the most valuable and insightful tellings of the history of the Aztecs. Camilla Townsend has been telling Paul Henley more about the Codex. She's professor of history at Rutgers University in the US and a specialist on the Aztecs.

37:36The Codex Azcatitlan is a really beautiful work of art, one of the loveliest of the Mexican codices. It is largely drawn in black ink and decorated in reds and oranges and yellows, sort of burnt colours, if you will. And it proceeds in a very beautiful way through their history, from the earliest legends up to the period of the arrival of the Spanish. It is illustrating all sorts of aspects of Mexica, as they call themselves, Aztec history, some warlike and some times of peace. For example, just describe what the figures look like. They're fairly primitive to some modern eyes, aren't they? Yes, they are.

38:16I guess you might use the word cartoon, but I don't mean cartoonish. They are two-dimensional but suggest three-dimensional. It's clearly by artists, Nahuatl or native indigenous artists who had gone to school with the friars and learned about Western perspective. One has the impression that they've learned to draw Western style quite recently. And so they're mixing Western presentation of the human body with all sorts of indigenous images and artwork. They show a road with a human footprint going along the path to indicate motion. And here and there, they do stop and war with their neighbours, but also do dances, sing songs, etc.

38:51So there they are living their lives when the Spaniards arrive. And do we know for sure that it was Aztec artists that did it? And were these pictures drawn at the time or as historical documents? We are certain that these were Aztec artists, indigenous artists, because the imagery is so loaded with native iconography, with stories that the Spaniards didn't even know. There would be no way for a Spanish person really to have created this piece of work in the colonial era. This is based on legends and history that were passed orally amongst the Nahuas. And we know these stories because they sometimes stopped and wrote them down in their own language for each other without a Spanish audience in mind.

39:35And it's only recently that we've even discovered these stories and read them. And these images match those stories. On the other hand, we do know that they did not do this right after the Spanish conquest, you know, right in the early 1500s. It looks to me like it would be at least a century later, probably the early 1600s. 1600s. And we say that because they have been to school learning the Spanish or European drawing techniques. They've introduced European dates right next to the Aztec dates, like you'll have the year one house and then someone will have written above that in a different writing, the year 1164.

40:08So these are people who have been living alongside the Spaniards for a while. So the codex is coming home. How big a deal is that? It's a very big deal. The Mexicans know, on some level they all know, what a grand history they have, the extraordinary nature of the civilizations that existed in Mexico before the conquest. But very few of them have the time, energy, resources to go and get their PhDs in this subject, so they don't know much about it. And of course, making matters worse, much of their heritage was taken from them, literally removed from the country, largely by the French, although some by English and Americans.

40:46Is there implied criticism of the Spanish, which wouldn't be surprising given that they were the invaders, the killers? This text was created by Nahuas or Aztecs for their own posterity. They did not expect Spaniards or any other Europeans to be among the audience. And it's very interesting when they do that, they allow themselves to complain and to voice anger more than they do in sources that are prepared by, with or for Spaniards. The Spaniards appear not to good advantage on several occasions. They are violent. The people, even women and children, are having their limbs cut off. The very last page shows friars involved in torturing indigenous people who are tied to wooden sticks.

41:29Minister for Women:And that was Camilla Townsend, Professor Camilla Townsend, speaking to Paul Henley. Just an update from our newsroom on that explosion. In northwestern Pakistan, the police are now saying that at least 17 people, including five police officers, were killed in that explosion, more than 70 others wounded. You're listening to NewsHour.

42:00Minister for Women:This is NewsHour from the BBC with me, Tim Franks. One of the oldest and most august parliamentary chambers in the world has had a bit of an update. Members of the House of Lords, Britain's upper chamber, have just this week approved a new rulebook. And among the changes, the dress code. The lords and ladies, the peers as they're known, will now be expected to wear business attire when debating or voting. In other words, and I realise this may come as a shock to some of you, male peers will no longer have to wear a tie. Peter York has long been one of Britain's most forthright voices on that slippery concept, style.

42:36Minister for Women:He's a writer, podcaster and visiting professor at the London College of Fashion. What's his view? It's a very, very sloppy idea of what constitutes modernisation. And if you take a population of men who are mostly very mature and who mostly don't know anything about clothes because their minds are above that sort of thing, if you say you don't have to wear a tie, That means they'll take it very literally. I'll take my tie off and then they will look sloppy because they will be wearing business attire, which means pretty much a suit or a serious jacket and dingy trousers. And so they'll look as if they've forgotten something that's important, which they usually wore.

43:28Now, all this is about how people buy and wear clothes. If you are consciously aiming for the no tie look, you buy a different sort of shirt and possibly even a different sort of jacket than you would if you were wearing a tie. It's about the spread of the collar, the way it upstands, the colour it is, whether it's an interesting texture or not. You don't just take the tie off a packet of three white shirts from a high street store and think, oh, I look cool now.

44:06Minister for Women:The counter-argument, I guess, is that it's also possible to dress badly with a tie and that the tie these days, in the wrong hands, it's a bit of a useless appendage. So why sort of demand that men have to wear a tie to sort of denote that they're taking care? Well, I think it's all about context. I'm saying these are pretty old guys mostly in a pretty old institution, Pugin Gothic, in which they have to say pretty old things. the noble lord, the fragrant baroness, etc, etc. And in that context, having your Marks and Spencer's three white shirts, pack shirt, open, and to what button do you take the openness?

45:00Well, that was going to be my next question. One button or two. Yes, you're likely to look a bit silly. What makes a good tie? One, that it's made of what it should be made of, that it's not too shiny, and it has some texture and some artistry in the patterning.

45:19Minister for Women:So when you say what it should be made of, you're saying not polyester? Not polyester. It's so fascinating how Donald Trump, with all the resources of the world, has a bright, shiny red tie that looks like polyester. I'm sure it isn't polyester. No, no, no. He's wearing a Brioni suit. And if I were a Brioni, I'd be a bit embarrassed by that because it doesn't fit him. Knitted ties? Where are you on them? Knitted ties? Oh, I love them. My absolute favourite tie, which I wear often, is a knitted sage green one. Teamed with a nice blue jacket with an Italian cut. Ooh. Well, it sounds absolutely...

46:05Minister for Women:Ooh, ooh, yeah. It sounds wonderful. And just in terms of ties, their day possibly may be done in the House of Lords. I don't know. I mean, we'll wait to see. I mean, their day is done mostly. Middle-aged bankers will wear a Hermes tie to go to a certain kind of meeting. And you'll wear a tie to a wedding. You're not going to wear morning dress with no tie, are you? No, no, indeed. Some items of clothing. I mean, one thinks of the bow tie. Occasionally you see them. But is that a source of regret when these things do sort of die a fashion death as far as you're concerned? I'm not that keen on bow ties except for the black tie ensemble.

46:43But perky blow ties, I think, can look quite silly.

46:47Minister for Women:And the cravat, last word? The cravat looks a bit naff, I think. But a cravat is different from a small scarf because a cravat is sort of nailed into place with stitching around the middle. whereas a make-it-yourself cravat made out of a nice small scarf can look very, very nice. I hope you're all taking notes there. Peter York, writer, podcaster and visiting professor at the London College of Fashion. That's it from this edition of News Out from me, Tim Franks, and the rest of the team in London, including my excellent editor today, Laurent Zavrieff, with whom this will be my final shift and I am extremely grateful for all her terrific work over the years from all of us.

47:33Minister for Women:Thanks for joining us.

47:40Can politicians improve our economic fortunes? Dave Ramsey says no. I'm Tristan Redmond from The Global Story and I've been speaking to the massively popular US money guru who says if there's a financial crisis, it's on us. When you borrow on credit cards and take out a$1 ,200 car payment on a freaking Range Rover. You've destroyed your life, not the president. For the full interview, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you listen.