From the AP:
Soldiers backing Ivory Coast’s defiant leader mowed down women protesting his refusal to leave power in a hail of gunfire Thursday, killing at least six and shocking a nation where women’s marches have historically been used as a last resort against an unrestrained army.
…Nearly 400 people have been killed in the west African country, including 32 in the last 24 hours, almost all of them men who had voted for opposition leader Alassane Ouattara, according to U.N. figures and combined with deaths confirmed by The Associated Press.
Last week, [Laurent] Gbagbo’s security forces entered the Abobo neighborhood and began shelling it with mortars, a shocking escalation indicating the army is willing to use war-grade weapons on its citizens. Before that, the bodies seen by reporters had bullet wounds where the point of impact was marked by a single stain of blood. Since the escalation, the bodies seen by reporters have arrived at the morgue in body bags dripping with blood.
…Gbagbo, a former history teacher, has refused to cede power, even though U.N.-certified results showed he had lost the race by half-a-million votes….
We look forward to how Pat Robertson’s CBN will report on all this. Back in January, I noted that CBN had conducted a softball interview with Gbagbo, which the station boasted had been “broadcast on Ivorian National Television”. The interview gave the Gbagbo a platform to discourse on his Christian faith, and CBN’s Gary Lane – aware of his brief to present Gbagbo as a Christian bulwark against Islam – didn’t spoil the mood by asking about Gbagbo’s polygamy or other awkward subjects. A follow-up segment on CBN suggested that Gbagbo had lost the election only because of “fraud” engineered by Saudi Arabia and “Muslims in France”.
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