Serious crime has decreased in Johannesburg, with a 5,6% drop in murders, a 9,9% drop in hijackings and an 18,8% decrease in attempted murders during the metro police’s Operation Token Days. ”There is a huge mountain of work which has been done,” Johannesburg metro police spokesperson Chief Superintendent Wayne Minnaar said on Friday.
A former Rwandan mayor convicted for the country’s 1994 genocide saw his 30-year sentence boosted to life in prison on Friday, as a United Nations-backed court rejected his appeal, accusing him of ”sadism”. Appeals judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda said the term handed down in June 2004 to Sylvestre Gacumbitsi had been too lenient.
Zimbabwean gay rights activist Keith Goddard has been arrested five times, beaten up by police and warned to stop his ”deviant” life. But he says he never wants to leave his African home. ”I made sure that I followed all the regulations to get rid of my British nationality so that the government would never come up with an excuse to throw me out,” says Goddard (46).
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Germany’s Lukas Podolski was named by Fifa on Friday as the World Cup’s best young player. The 21-year-old Polish-born striker scored three goals after coach Jurgen Klinsmann had selected him as part of a drive to reinvigorate a flagging team. He has now scored 15 goals in 31 appearances with the national team.
A Dutchman abducted on Thursday in Nigeria’s violent oil-producing Niger Delta is in good health but his kidnappers’ demands are not yet known, a spokesperson for Bayelsa state in the delta said on Friday. Gunmen seized the man, who was working on an unfinished Shell gas plant in Bayelsa, from a houseboat after disarming police on guard.
The Scorpions have in the past several hours arrested five people suspected of being part of an international drug syndicate and also seized drugs with a street value of over R250-million. The five people — aged between 35 and 70 — were arrested following an undercover operation that led investigators to a self-storage facility in Alberton, south-east of Johannesburg.
If the old adage holds true and one’s home is one’s castle, in the United States at least one’s bathroom is a palace where showers are kitted out with iPods and there are plasma screen televisions in the spa bath. Americans will spend -billion on luxury bathrooms this year — 10 times more than the United States government will devote to HIV/Aids research.
North Korea rounded on its critics in dramatic fashion on Thursday, warning that it planned to test-launch more missiles and would resort to ”physical actions” against any country that continued to pressure it to abandon its missile programme. It called the tests successful, even though a Taepodong-2 missile splashed down in the Sea of Japan 40 seconds after launch.
Casino owners in Atlantic City are counting the cost of a two-day shutdown caused by New Jersey governor Jon Corzine’s gamble to fix a ,5-billion hole in the state’s Budget. The city’s 12 gaming halls closed when 45 000 state employees, including casino inspectors, were sent home as politicians resisted Corzine’s plan to increase sales tax.
Thirty-eight people, including trade union officials, appeared briefly in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court on Friday in connection with the May 16 rampage through Cape Town by striking security guards. The cases were postponed to August 25 for further investigation.