Snowmail: democracy and the African Union

Last Modified: 30 Jun 2008
By: Jon Snow

On tonight's show...

We're at the African Union Summit at Sharm el-Sheikh. The truth is that Robert Mugabe who arrived there overnight has put the cat among the pigeons because as an abuser of democracy etc he's hardly alone at such a gathering.

Indeed the host, President Mubarak, has come in for a good deal of criticism himself with human rights workers saying he never subjected himself to a free and fair democratic test of his popularity.

Tonight we have Jonathan Miller's report from this intriguing gathering and we talk with foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, Mark Malloch Brown, who espouses the view that the man who embraces democracy and then abuses it is worse than a man that never embraces it.

Read our Noon report here.

Latest London teen stabbing tragedy

Here, yet another young man is stabbed to death in London. He was a promising young actor who had appeared on The Bill. It's a case of fiction as fact and we're looking into it in a week in which Channel 4 is majoring on gun and knife crime.

Read more on Disarming Britain here.

Will Afghanistan mayhem get worse?

Another soldier is killed in Afghanistan. We talk to the Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid who warns that the mayhem in that country can only get worse and we speak to Sean Langhan, recently released by the Taliban from three months captivity.

Watch the full interview with Ahmed Rashid here.

Modern art in motion

Finally, art in the madhouse, or is it? Tate Britain, with vast expanses of open space in the main hall, has commissioned a most unusual piece of art. It involves human sprinters running extraordinarily fast through the space. Nicholas Glass has his running shoes on and will reporting at 7.

See our photo gallery on Martin Creed's Work No. 850 exhibition at the Tate Britain.

From Kylie on More4 News

Since Saturday, Pakistani troops have been engaged in an offensive against Islamists trying to take control of Peshawar, the strategic city on the road to Afghanistan. Does this mean the new government is finally getting to grips with the militancy it promised to fix?

We have a rare glimpse of some of the unrest plaguing small towns and cities across China, as is often the case, it's not about national or international issues, but suspicions of local government corruption. In this case, there's an alleged cover-up of the murder and rape of a teenage girl by someone well-connected. Unusually, there is video, including pictures put on the internet over the weekend apparently showing police cars being set alight.

And a special report from Amsterdam, where the smoking ban coming in tomorrow is causing even more confusion than usual in the dope-filled coffee shops, cafes that exist solely for the purpose of smoking. In a classic Dutch compromise, smoking is ok as long as the smokers keep it pure, that means no tobacco.