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The prosecution in the Schabir Shaik fraud and corruption trial has asked the state to change Shaik’s bail conditions after he launched a verbal attack on advocate Anton Steynberg before the start of proceedings in courtroom A on Friday. ”I’m not scared of you, I’ll sort you out after the trial,” Shaik shouted at the prosecutor.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Friday evening dismissed comments by Zimbabwe’s ambassador to South Africa that the union body’s protest at the Zimbabwe border ”achieved nothing” and turned out to be ”no blockade”.
A rape suspect grabbed a policeman’s gun and opened fire in a courtroom in the United States on Friday, killing the judge, a sheriff’s deputy and a court reporter. Another deputy was wounded as he chased the suspect, Brian Nichols, who ran from the court in Atlanta, Georgia.
A former Nazi who founded a secretive German colony in South America where opponents of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship were tortured has been arrested after more than a decade on the run. Detectives in Argentina captured Paul Schäfer, an 84-year-old German, on Thursday on the outskirts of the capital, Buenos Aires.
A former New York police detective who had a bit part in in the film GoodFellas and co-wrote a book about the mafia, has been charged with taking part in eight murders while working undercover for the mob. The charges include using an unmarked police car to pull over Eddie Lino, a mafia captain from the Gambino family in Brooklyn and shooting him to death.
The Pentagon is planning to transfer half the inmates at Guantánamo Bay to prisons in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen, despite fears that they would face even worse human rights abuses than at the United States camp. The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has urged the State Department to ratchet up the pressure on unresponsive allies to take custody of the prisoners.
The White House abandoned its uncompromising policy on Iran and its feared nuclear programme for the first time in two years on Friday by joining the Europeans in offering to reward Tehran if it halts its most ambitious nuclear project.
A determined 85 by former captain Heath Streak saw Zimbabwe make 289 in their first innings on the first day of the second Castle Lager/MTN cricket Test against South Africa at Supersport Park on Friday. Injuries to three of his main bowlers meant problems for Graeme Smith, who had to make do with ”bits-and-pieces” bowlers like AB de Villiers.
A spelling mistake in a United States Congress transcript and the name of a food scare gripping Britain are the latest quirky twists to have fuelled anti-Western paranoia in Sudan, currently under huge international pressure over the violence in Darfur. Minister of Agriculture Majub al-Khalifa Ahmed has accused the United States of being ”the state of the devil”.
The Department of Education and teacher unions reached an agreement on Friday to increase teachers’ salaries and bonuses by more than R500-million. They reached an agreement on the outstanding matter of salary progression for teachers for the period 1996 to 2002. The agreement provides for salary increases of up to 3% for some teachers.