Sri Lankan troops killed 38 Tamil Tiger rebels for the loss of four soldiers in fresh fighting in the island’s north, the military said on Friday. Thursday’s fighting came as the military captured stretches of Tiger-held terrain in the north-western district of Mannar as part of a wider strategy to gradually retake the Tigers’ northern stronghold and win a 25-year civil war.
Iraqi police said on Friday 68 people were killed in coordinated bombings blamed on al-Qaeda in a packed shopping area in central Baghdad on Thursday. Another 120 were wounded when two bombs exploded within minutes of each other on Thursday in Baghdad’s mainly Shi’ite Karrada district, police said.
The University of the Free State (UFS) has obtained a further court interdict to maintain calm on the main campus in Bloemfontein and on the Vista campus, also in the city, a UFS spokesperson said on Friday. Spokesperson Anton Fischer said the interdict was obtained because a number of outside organisations were planning to hold mass demonstrations.
Nokia on Friday announced a deal to sell handsets worth a total â,¬2-billion to China Postel during 2008, in the company’s largest market. The world’s number one cellphone maker said the deal includes the development of technological infrastructure and marketing with China Postel, with which it has worked since 1998.
British spirits group Diageo and Dutch brewer Heineken said on Friday they had agreed to form two new joint ventures in South Africa to combine their drinks businesses and also build a brewery. Diageo, which makes Smirnoff vodka and Johnnie Walker whisky, and Heineken, famed for its lager, said they had teamed up with Namibia Breweries to form DHN Drinks.
Ask anyone in India who Virat Kohli is and they will surely tell you he’s the captain of their under-19 cricket team. Try that with Wayne Parnell and you’re likely to get a few puzzled responses on the streets of South Africa. Yet both led their teams with equal aplomb to reach the final of the recent International Cricket Council Under-19 World Cup in Malaysia.
Atrocities in the Middle East are often carefully planned and the Palestinian gunman who killed eight Israelis in Jerusalem on Thursday night may have been carrying out a dual act of revenge for the recent onslaught in the Gaza Strip and the assassination of a Hezbollah commander in Damascus.
A man accused of killing 18-year-old Kyle Norris in an East Rand nightclub in 2006 pleaded self defence in the Johannesburg High Court on Thursday. ”I had no intention of killing anyone,” Jonathan Street told Judge Nico Coetzee on Thursday afternoon.
Zimbabwe has invited 47 regional and sub-regional organisations as well as countries from Africa, Asia, the Americas and one European country — Russia — to observe this month’s election, the government mouthpiece Herald reported on Friday.
The list reads like the credit roll from a 1980s movie: Sylvester Stallone, Farrah Fawcett and Keith Carradine. Instead they are the standout names from a five-page list of witnesses released on Thursday by prosecutors at the start of the long-awaited trial of Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano.