A new railway line being built as part of an upgrade ahead of the Beijing Olympics was a factor in a train crash that left 71 people dead in east China, officials and state press said on Wednesday. The pre-dawn crash near Zibo city on Monday, which also left more than 400 people injured, was the most severe in China in more than 10 years.
A special unit of Burundi’s police arbitrarily detained and tortured civilians last year, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) group said in a report released on Wednesday. In a 42-page report entitled Every Morning They Beat Me: Police Abuses in Burundi, HRW documented 21 cases of beatings and torture carried out in October 2007.
Ethiopian troops allied to Somalia’s shaky government shot dead 13 civilians after an explosion killed two soldiers on Wednesday, witnesses in south-western Somalia said. Witness Mohamud Ahmed Nur said what appeared to be a remote-controlled land mine hit the Ethiopian troops patrolling Baidoa town and killed two soldiers.
Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez stoked up a row over Didier Drogba’s theatrics after refusing to retract his claims that the Chelsea striker is a diver. Benitez angered Chelsea boss Avram Grant by revealing he showed his defenders a video dossier of Drogba exaggerating fouls before last week’s Champions League semifinal first leg.
Georgia on Wednesday slammed Russia’s plans to boost peacekeeping troops in two rebel Georgian regions as the start of "full-scale military aggression". "It’s hard to believe that this is being done for the purposes of peacekeeping; it’s rather the beginning of full-scale military aggression," Georgian Foreign Minister David Bakradze said.
India’s largest hospital and pharmacy chain, Apollo Hospitals Enterprise, is planning to set up hospitals in African countries, chairperson Prathap Reddy said on Wednesday. Apollo plans to take its total hospital bed count to 10 000 from 8 000 now over 18 months.
Harsh living conditions in Kenya are making it difficult for HIV-positive people displaced in the recent election violence to stay healthy.
Australia’s Brumbies will not to be sidetracked by history or the widely acclaimed Stormers injuries in the run-up to Saturday’s make-or-break Super 14 clash at Newlands. The history books will show that the last time the Brumbies lost at Newlands was in 1998, and apart from one draw in 2006, they’ve always defeated the Stormers in the Mother City in a decade of clashes.
Wales players are set to be exposed to a week of training at a cryotherapy centre ahead of the Six Nations Grand Slam winners’ two Test tour of South Africa in June, coach Warren Gatland announced on Tuesday. Cryotherapy is a process in which the body is briefly subjected to extremely low temperatures below -110°C.
South African petrol pump prices and wholesale diesel prices will rise sharply next week, the government said on Wednesday, adding to inflationary pressures. The Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs said all grades of petrol would on May 7 rise by 55 cents, or 6,2%, to R9,46 a litre in Gauteng.