The party of President Nursultan Nazarbayev has won all seats in Kazakhstan’s new Parliament, according to preliminary results announced on Sunday by the Central Elections Commission. The results were quickly condemned by the country’s two largest opposition groupings, which said the figures were manipulated.
A Benoni woman, abandoned on the Bapsfontein Road by her drunk husband following an argument about speeding, hitched a lift only to find to herself passing the wreckage of his bakkie with their seriously injured toddler son inside, Ekurhuleni metro police said early on Sunday.
A joint mission of several United Nations agencies is conducting an emergency investigation into the shooting of endangered mountain gorillas in a Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) national park, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) said on Saturday.
Sierra Leone’s opposition All People’s Congress on Saturday kept its lead with more than 80% of the votes counted after last week’s elections, but fell short of absolute majority, an official tally showed. About 2,6-million people were eligible to choose a new president and a 112-seat Parliament.
Côte d’Ivoire’s government has paid out more than -million to about one-third of the people poisoned a year ago when toxic fumes swept across Abidjan, officials said on Saturday. But about 66 000 others are still waiting for their share of compensation.
Rival sub-clans fought over access to wells in central Somalia on Saturday, killing at least 20 people and wounding several others, elders said, as the countryside sank into a vortex of violence. Also on Saturday, two people were killed and four others wounded in the capital, Mogadishu, in a fresh spate of insurgent attacks.
As it pieces together its shattered mining sector after a 10-year civil war fuelled by so-called ”blood diamonds”, Sierra Leone is turning attention to processing its uncut gemstones. For years, the diamond-rich West African country has mined diamonds and exported them raw, but the focus is now on ”beneficiation”.
Suspected insurgents shot dead a top elder from Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi’s clan overnight on Saturday in Mogadishu, a spokesperson for the premier’s office said. ”Moalim Harun Moalim Yusuf was one of the prominent Somali clan chiefs,” Abdullahi Mohieddin Odka said.
It is a world characterised by doping and extortion, by stressed performers under extreme pressure to reach beyond what is humanly possible in order to satisfy hungry sponsors’ needs. The disgraced world of cycling? No, this is a description of the stately world of opera.
Six hundred warm-blooded volunteers amassed on a shrinking glacier in Switzerland on Saturday to take off their clothes in the name of art. The latest installation by New York artist Spencer Tunick was a collaboration with Greenpeace, designed to draw attention to global warming and the melting Swiss glaciers.