A United Nations helicopter on a routine flight in eastern Sierra Leone crashed into a hillside on Tuesday, killing all 24 people on board, a UN spokesperson said. The helicopter, belonging to the Siberian-based UT Air charter company, was on a routine morning flight.
At least 6 000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were left homeless after a fire gutted parts of the sprawling Pabbo camp in northern Uganda, destroying hundreds of grass-thatched huts where the IDPs had been living, local leaders and the army said.
The world must move quickly to avoid a repeat of the Rwandan genocide in Sudan’s western Darfur region, Chadian President Idriss Deby said on Wednesday. As Deby spoke, United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan kicked off separate visits to Sudan, both focused on Darfur.
Gun owners came under fire in the Pretoria High Court on Wednesday for the late filing of an application to have the implementation of the Firearms Control Act delayed beyond midnight. Their application was dismissed by Judge Ben du Plessis, who found there was no merit to the application.
The conservative African Christian Democratic Party has come out firing in support of a Christian picket against the Firearms Control Act outside Parliament on Wednesday. The picket was aimed at expressing opposition to the Firearms Control Act, which comes into operation at midnight on Wednesday.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=117976">Gun owners ‘hold court to ransom'</a>
After more than a decade on the beat in central Cape Town, the City Community Patrol Board must cease its activities by Friday, according to the South African Police Service. However, there was unhappiness with the closure of the rent-a-cops, as they were commonly known, with 70 employees not absorbed into the police.
United States President George Bush and French President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday clashed sharply for the second day running at Nato’s Istanbul summit, squabbling publicly over Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey’s place in Europe. The French president undermined hopes of burying transatlantic disagreements when he insisted he was ”entirely hostile” to any Nato presence in Iraq.
Tanks, troops and bulldozers reoccupied a Gaza town on Tuesday in a bid to curb Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, after the crudely made missiles claimed their first Israeli victims, a man and a three-year-old boy. Hamas responded by firing more of the unguided rockets as the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, visited Sderot, the scene of Monday’s killing of the boy.
‘Israel should stop targeting Arafat’
South Africa recorded a trade deficit of R76,4-million for its trade with non-Southern African Customs Union trading partners in May from a surprise R3,121-billion deficit in April following a R2,085-billion surplus in March, according to the latest customs and excise figures released on Wednesday.
Talks between world number-five gold miner Harmony and the group’s unions, including the National Union of Mineworkers, regarding the closure of shafts has reached a deadlock, the NUM said in a statement on Wednesday. The parties have failed to make any significant progress since the agreement of a framework in May.