United Nations agencies called on Monday for field hospitals, medicines and tents to be rushed to Indonesia within days as the global relief effort to help tens of thousands of earthquake victims gathered pace. In Geneva, UN and Red Cross agencies met to try to coordinate the huge mobilisation.
Ah, come on, guys, let’s have a bit of fun out there for a change. Television can’t just be soapies, game shows and chat shows. We could have had Die Groot Krokodil show, a rare television interview with PW Botha on the eve of his 90th birthday. But every single station manager in the country was too alarmed at the thought to let it go ahead.
Coalition warplanes bombed Taliban meeting in a mosque in southern Afghanistan on Monday, killing up to 50 suspected rebels, Afghan and the United States-led coalition officials said. Five Canadian soldiers were wounded and a suspected Taliban killed in a gun battle elsewhere in the volatile south.
Members of militias fighting for control of the Somali capital could face war-crimes charges for attempting to prevent the wounded and civilians from receiving assistance during the conflict, a United Nations official warned on Monday. The battle between fundamentalist Islamic militias and rival secular combatants has forced about 1 500 to seek treatment.
Khat chewers are at greater risk of heart disease and liver damage, according to a paper published by Britain’s Royal Society of Medicine, which says doctors should be trained to spot harm caused by this habit. Sagar Saha and Clare Dollery of Londons Heart Hospital cite the case of a 33-year-old East African man, a daily khat-chewer, who was admitted to their hospital with a heart attack.
Mogadishu residents cautiously returned to their homes on Monday, taking advantage of a lull in fierce factional fighting to pick through rubble-strewn neighbourhoods in the capital. At 62 people have been killed and hundreds wounded, most of them civilians, in the latest round of fighting that began on Wednesday.
At least 42 people were injured when three blasts rocked a town in southern Ethiopia at the weekend in the latest of a series of mystery explosions to have hit the country, police said on Monday. The simultaneous blasts hit a hotel and two restaurants in Jijiga, about 720km south-east of Addis Ababa around 7pm on Saturday.
Transnet and two of its pension funds have decided to dispose of their share in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, billed as South Africa’s most visited tourist destination. The remaining shareholder, the Transnet Retirement Fund, has yet to decide whether it will sell its 22,6% share, or retain it and push it up to 26%.
Wherever you go, people stare at you. Paparazzi take pictures, fans ask for autographs, absolute strangers wonder aloud if they once met you at a party. For the hard-pressed celebrity there’s only one way to get away from it all: hide on your own desert island.
Authorities in Zimbabwe want all political parties to be registered to prevent ”rogue parties” contesting future elections, reports said on Monday. Zimbabwe is deeply divided between supporters of President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.