The head of Russia’s cash-starved navy caused uproar on Tuesday when he announced that the fleet’s flagship nuclear-powered missile cruiser Peter the Great had been temporarily withdrawn from service because of fears that it ”could explode at any moment”.
Intelligence and anti-terrorism services in Britain and other European countries have been given the names of several Islamist radicals suspected of taking part in the Madrid train bombings who have fled Spain, according to western intelligence officials.
South Africa’s CPIX inflation (headline inflation excluding mortgage costs) was up 4,8% year-on-year for metro and other areas in February compared with 4,2% in January and 4% in December, Statistics South Africa said on Wednesday. "It is what we expected," an economist said.
Global index company FTSE is to continue to treat South Africa as an advanced emerging market, the JSE Securities Exchange South Africa (JSE) said in a statement on Wednesday. At the invitation of FTSE, the JSE made representations in December 2003 to the FTSE policy committee.
South Africa, Botswana and Namibia have all met the conditions required for international trade in ivory, the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism said on Tuesday. It said the process had been delayed due to lack of data from certain south-east Asian countries.
Nine Iraqi police officers and trainees died on Tuesday when gunmen sprayed bullets into a minivan in which they were travelling south of Baghdad near the town of Mussayab. Mussayab’s police chief, Major Kadhim Ajmi, said the killers were in a red Opel which drove past the car and shot into it.
Burundi’s warlords are recruiting thousands of child soldiers despite a peace accord which was supposed to end a decade of conflict, according to a report published on Wednesday by Amnesty International. ”The prospects for a lasting peace will be seriously threatened as those who have known only violence are re-recruited … or turn to violent crime,” the report says.
The Israeli government has approved the elimination of the entire leadership of Hamas and other militant groups following the assassination of the Islamic resistance movement’s founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Israel’s internal security minister, Tsahi Hanegbi, said the government had given a green light to the army to kill ”the worst terrorists”.
Israel ‘targeting Hamas leadership’
‘Israel has opened the gate to hell’
The White House was facing a crisis in confidence on Wednesday over its handling of the al-Qaeda threat prior to September 11, as a public inquiry into the attacks demanded to question George Bush’s national security adviser. The standoff with the inquiry could damage the White House’s popularity in a tightly contested presidential campaign.
One in three people will be 65 or older by the year 2050, according to a report that foresees the world’s population growing to more than nine billion. The United States government’s annual projections of world population growth show that while the number of children is expected to stay roughly the same, there could be three times as many old people as today.