South Africa will launch an investigation into recruitment by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant in the country, after an Al Jazeera investigation revealed that at least 23 South Africans had joined the group, the Ministry of State Security has said.
Brian Dube, spokesperson for State Security, said on Saturday that the ministry would be looking into the findings made in an Al Jazeera investigation published on Friday that entire families had travelled to ISIL-held territory.
Dube’s comments came after David Mahlobo, minister of State Security, told South African television channel ENCA on Friday that officials were working hard to verify the information revealed by Al Jazeera.
“Those claims, we are going to investigate them because as you are aware we did have an intervention and have met with the Muslim judicial council where they raised issues that a number of South Africans visiting the Middle East, some can be lured into joining ISIL.
“But at this particular point we have noted the allegations. A team of our officials are working hard on the ground with the information to verify its veracity,” Dube said.
In a feat that calls to mind the memory-tweaking technology in the film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," a team of researchers restored "lost memories" in the brains of mice. The mice in the study were given a drug that prevented them from consolidating a fearful memory. But when neurons involved in encoding the memory were stimulated with pulses of light, the animals were able to retrieve the forgotten recollection. In some forms of amnesia, past memories may not be erased, but may just be inaccessible for recall, said Susumu Tonegawa, director of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan and co-author of the study, said in a statement. If the findings are confirmed in humans, the knowledge could benefit people who suffer from retrograde amnesia, an inability to recall memories that were made before the amnesia, which is common in traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer's disease and other brain disorders. Scientists have long debated whether retrograde ...
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