Four men were convicted on Monday of plotting to bomb London’s transport system on July 21 2005 in a botched attempt to replicate Islamist suicide bombings that had killed 52 people two weeks earlier. Police said the men, Muslims of African origin, would have caused carnage on a similar scale to the attacks a fortnight before.
Africa is suffering a crisis of leadership and its heads of state must show more mutual confidence and solidarity if they want to advance continental integration, the African Union’s top diplomat said on Monday. Alpha Oumar Konare, who chairs the AU Commission, was giving his analysis of an inconclusive AU summit in Ghana last week.
Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, on Monday predicted chaos as a result of the government’s clampdown on the business community, which has seen the prices of many goods more than halved and over 1Â 300 business people arrested.
The importance of the Proudly South African campaign is undisputed, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) said about the troubled organisation on Monday. Last month the Proudly South African campaign denied media reports that the DTI had withdrawn its support.
Big manufacturing and construction companies were the hardest hit on Monday as a national strike by metal and engineering workers got under way. Smaller firms appeared to have been the least affected, said the Steel and Engineering Industry Federation of South Africa.
People living in communities surrounding a large shallow lake in China have been overrun by field mice after flood waters drove the rodents out of islands on the lake, state media reported on Monday. The mouse invasion began on June 23 when the Yangtze River flooded, raising the water level in central China’s Dongting Lake.
South Africa’s transport system is becoming increasingly inadequate in responding to export-led growth, Transport Minister Jeff Radebe said on Monday. Speaking at the South African Transport Conference in Pretoria, Radebe said road networks were congested and ”bursting at the seams”. A resource not fully used was sea transport.
Microsoft will not say what went wrong inside its Xbox 360 video-game consoles that could lead to -billion in repairs, but bloggers and their online readers seem to have their own answer: heat stroke. Frustrated gamers have been going to blogs and forums to swap horror stories and voodoo-like solutions for problems with the consoles.
The main rebel group in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta said on Monday the abduction of a three-year-old British girl was unrelated to political violence and the armed struggle over oil revenues would continue. Margaret Hill was released on Sunday night after four days in the hands of unknown ransom seekers.
When internet consultant Giovanni Gallucci first joined the professional networking site LinkedIn two years ago, he felt like a pioneer. Now he’s one of millions. The 10 biggest social networking sites had more than 200-million visitors in March. Together, their users blogged, tagged, uploaded, messaged and viewed a staggering 34-billion web pages.