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/ 12 February 2008
More than 10 000 people have been forced from their homes and two thousand makeshift houses swept away by floods after heavy rain pounded parts of southern Angola. Some of those displaced were being put up in tents at makeshift camps while others were being housed in schools.
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/ 12 February 2008
Two employees of United States broadcaster CBS News, one reportedly a British journalist, have been kidnapped in Iraq. The United Kingdom journalist was seized by gunmen in Basra with his interpreter on Sunday, according to the Iraqi news agency Aswat al-Iraq (Voice of Iraq).
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/ 12 February 2008
South Africa’s elite, FBI-style Scorpions anti-crime unit will be dissolved, Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula said on Tuesday. ”The Scorpions … will be dissolved and the organised crime unit of the police will be phased out and a new, amalgamated unit will be created,” Nqakula told Parliament in Cape Town.
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/ 12 February 2008
Danish police on Tuesday arrested several people suspected of planning to attack one of the cartoonists who drew controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad for Denmark’s biggest daily in 2005, police said. Intelligence agency PET ”conducted a police operation in the Aarhus region … to prevent a murder linked to terrorism”, PET chief Jakob Scharf said.
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/ 12 February 2008
Standard Bank said on Tuesday that it is issuing about 20 000 chip and PIN bank cards a month as part of an ongoing exercise to match international standards and sharply improve card security. The group said in a statement that card skimming is again on the rise.
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/ 12 February 2008
A shocking new range of price increases were announced on Tuesday as Zimbabwe’s world-record hyperinflation spun further out of control, with charges for cellphone calls soaring by nearly 1 700%. The official National Incomes and Prices Commission said international calls were up to Z,2-million from Z 400 per minute.
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/ 12 February 2008
The United Democratic Movement councillor for the Metsimaholo municipality in the Free State, who was shot in the face recently, has died in hospital, police confirmed on Tuesday. Isaac Mokgatla (38) was shot in the Tshepiso informal settlement after he collected his two children from a school on January 31.
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/ 12 February 2008
The African National Congress’s (ANC) national working committee urged party members on Tuesday to refrain from undisciplined and divisive behaviour ahead of the ANC’s provincial conference season. Members were asked to ”desist from behaviour that threatened the unity and discipline of the movement”.
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/ 12 February 2008
South Africa’s Minister of Trade and Industry, Mandisi Mpahlwa, said on Tuesday the country’s support for a planned aluminium smelter at Coega remained unshaken despite a power shortage. Eskom said in January that electricity intensive investment projects could be reviewed due to the country’s power shortage.
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/ 12 February 2008
Russia and China have proposed a new treaty to ban the use of weapons in space, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a conference on disarmament in Geneva on Tuesday. ”Without preventing an arms race in space, international security will be wanting,” Lavrov told the conference.