Sleeping feels like a sin for an exhausted Ryu Haeng-sik who looks after his two young daughters in suburban Seoul, waiting for word on his wife held by Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. ”It feels like my heart is being scorched. It’s unbelievable how sinful I feel for just eating and sleeping,” Ryu said in an interview.
Russian rugby has come a long way since the Stalinist dark days when the former Soviet dictator banned it for being too bourgeois. Now with a French coach in charge and with a marketing guru in place, the Russian federation is aiming to qualify for the 2011 World Cup in New Zealand.
The United Nations Security Council reached broad agreement on a draft resolution to authorise up to 26Â 000 troops and police for Sudan’s Darfur region, with a vote anticipated this week. Britain and France distributed a fourth revised text late on Monday to be sent to governments of the 15 council members.
Former Wallabies coach Eddie Jones’s defection to the Springboks has upset his former protégés but they remain upbeat about their prospects for the World Cup, coach John Connolly said on Tuesday. Connolly and new captain Stirling Mortlock admitted that seeing Jones in a South African tracksuit was an unpleasant surprise.
A South African union said it had launched a strike over wages at Chevron’s 100 000-barrel-per-day refinery in Cape Town and PetroSA’s 36 000 bpd Mossel Bay gas-to-liquid plant. Welile Nolingo, secretary general of the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers’ Union, said the strike would continue until the union’s demands are met.
Growth in demand for credit by South Africa’s private sector quickened to 24,92% year-on-year in June, data showed on Tuesday, hardening the case for another interest rate increase next month. Analysts had expected a new law clamping down on credit lending that came into force in June to have bolstered the central bank’s monetary tightening efforts.
Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times, said on Monday it would be a ”worthy competitor” for News Corp if Rupert Murdoch’s company succeeded in buying the Wall Street Journal. It said it was exploring TV tie-ups to strengthen its position.
The second South Korean hostage shot dead by Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan was identified on Tuesday as Shim Sung-min (29) a former IT firm employee who did volunteer work to help the poor. Afghan authorities recovered his blood-stained body dumped south-west of Kabul.
A record-breaking 180 African immigrants reached the Canary Islands in a single ocean-going canoe on Monday as new super-sized vessels began to be used in the perilous journey from Africa’s Atlantic coast. The 180 sub-Saharan Africans were picked up by a Spanish maritime rescue vessel off the island of Tenerife.
The father of two boys who were killed in the 1993 Mthatha raid ordered by FW de Klerk wants the former president to be prosecuted. The twin boys of Sigqibo Mpendulo were shot in their sleep at their home which De Klerk said had been confirmed a Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) safe house.