Strong winds and rain lashed Taiwan as Typhoon Sepat made landfall on Saturday, cutting power supplies to more than 70 000 homes and forcing more than 1 000 people to evacuate and airlines to delay flights. Two cars were crushed by a falling billboard in Taipei.
China has ordered its media to report only positive news and has imprisoned a pro-democracy dissident amid a clampdown on dissent ahead of the most important meeting of the communist party in five years. Media controls have been tightened, Aids activists detained and NGOs shut down.
Aside from the physical damage it wrought, this week’s coordinated bombing attack in Iraq by suspected al-Qaeda operatives revived fears among the Yezidi community, one of the region’s oldest ethno-religious groups, of annihilation at the hands of their religious enemies — in this case, Sunni extremists.
In a bold bid to turn back a rising financial storm, the United States Federal Reserve on Friday cut a key bank lending rate and signalled a willingness to take more dramatic action to cushion the economy from tightening credit. The US central bank tried to calm financial markets by lowering the discount rate that governs Fed loans to banks.
Adriaan Vlok and Frank Chikane shook hands in the Pretoria High Court on Friday, but later differed on how apartheid-era crimes should be put to rest. After the brief court proceedings, there were separate news conferences: one for Chikane, and one for Vlok and his four co-accused.
A strike at South African Airways (SAA) has been called off, the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) said on Friday. General secretary Randall Howard said the 350 Satawu members who work at the technical division of SAA called off the strike after the company and union reached an agreement.
African National Congress (ANC) presidential contender Tokyo Sexwale criticised the current state of the ANC on Friday at an ANC Youth League fund-raising dinner, saying it is marked by ”character assassinations, smear campaigns, mudslinging, whispering campaigns and rumour-mongering”.
Hurricane Dean is expected to grow into a ferocious category-five storm as it passes Jamaica and nears Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the oil and gas rigs of the Gulf of Mexico after it smashed into several Caribbean islands, the United States National Hurricane Centre said on Friday.
More than 180 coal miners were trapped underground in eastern China on Saturday after heavy rain caused a river to flood and inundate two separate pits, the latest accident to hit the world’s deadliest mining industry. The official Xinhua news agency said 584 miners were rescued after Friday’s incident.
Southern African leaders failed on Friday to heed calls for strong action against the embattled Zimbabwean government, saying the ailing country’s problems are ”exaggerated”. ”We feel they [Zimbabwe] will solve their economic problems,” the chairperson of the Southern African Development Community told journalists.