A series of car bombs and mortar attacks killed 50 people in Iraq, police and local officials said on Saturday, while the United States military announced six soldiers had been killed in the past two days. The fresh violence follows a relatively quiet few days in Iraq, where tens of thousands of US and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against insurgents
A lengthy legal battle over the rights to treasure believed to be worth £1-billion, which went down with a Spanish galleon 300 years ago off Colombia’s Caribbean coast, was thrown into further confusion on Friday despite a ruling by Colombia’s highest court to finally decide ownership.
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Israel and the West Bank this month to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace, making her first trip to the region since the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip. An official said Rice hoped to ”move forward” on Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) left no doubt on Friday about its opposition to the notion of ”two centres of power”. ”We remained steadfast that there cannot be two centres of power, because that would be disastrous for our country,” president Fikile Mbalula said in a statement.
United States President George Bush turned 61 on Friday but he had little to celebrate at the end of a week in which his isolation has been exposed as never before. Laura Bush held an early family party for him on Wednesday and on Thursday the president made a rare outing to watch a baseball game.
Hundreds of war veterans and ruling party militiamen and loyalists summoned by Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe arrived by the busload at his party headquarters for a meeting on Friday as government-ordered price cuts spurred mounting chaos in the economy.
The first of nine concerts across the globe aimed at persuading millions of fans to go green for the environment swung into life in Sydney on Saturday with fiery vocals and a distinctive Australian beat. Following in the footsteps of the Live Aid and Live 8 mega-gigs, Live Earth hopes to reach up to two billion people through radio, television and the internet.
When a head of state makes more headlines for running round the block than running the country, it brings a new meaning to "fit for office". The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, is seen so often pounding the pavement that satirists call him "Nike-olas".
Many of the world’s biggest pop stars performed at Live Earth concerts around the globe on Saturday to try to persuade fans and governments to go green. Tens of thousands of people poured into venues in Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hamburg to hear Linkin Park, Rihanna, Shakira, Kumi Koda and others, while former United States vice-president Al Gore appealed for action on climate change.
A suicide truck bomber ripped the heart out of a northern Iraqi village on Saturday, killing at least 105 people and demolishing dozens of homes and shops, police and medics said. Officials were stunned by the scale of the blast, which devastated the main market in Emerli, a small rural community of people from Iraq’s Shi’ite Turkmen minority.