Eleven people have been hospitalised after they came into contact with a parcel containing a white powder — possibly anthrax — at a post office in Alberton, south of Johannesburg, police said on Friday. Inspector Juanita Kilian said police had received a complaint from the post office at Jacqueline Mall in Randhart at about 10am about a ”suspicious” parcel.
Rafael Nadal beat Tomas Berdych 7-6 6-4 6-2 to reach the Wimbledon semifinals on Friday. The players had trouble adjusting to the wind on Centre Court in the opening games with number two seed Nadal breaking Berdych’s serve in the second and the Czech, seeded seventh, breaking back immediately.
Niger’s ruling party has backed growing demands for peace talks with Saharan rebels, piling pressure on President Mamadou Tandja to sit down with the authors of a bloody five-month-old uprising. The Niger Movement for Justice has attacked government and mining interests in Niger’s mineral-rich north.
Ahmed Alhaj Ali’s tumultuous week started with his detention by Palestinian forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and ended with him shuttling from safe house to safe house to evade Israeli arrest. Forces loyal to Abbas have detained at least 299 Hamas supporters in the West Bank in the last three weeks, according to a Hamas official.
Namibia’s annual seal hunting season started this week, over the protests of animal rights activists who say the practice is cruel. The government accused the activists of ”deliberately distorting information,” and said controlling the seal population was important for the fishing industry.
Thousands of Palestinians marched in Gaza on Friday for the funerals of 11 people, including nine militants from the ruling Hamas, who were killed in an Israeli raid into the central Gaza Strip a day earlier. The Israeli army said it had concluded an incursion into central Gaza near the Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps.
A Spanish woman who pulled the mask off a man as he tried to strangle her was astonished to discover the attacker was her estranged husband, Spanish media reported on Friday. The woman had thought the masked man, who burst into the bakery where she worked in the city of Valencia, was a robber.
Mitigation, mitigation, mitigation — the need for action to halt climate change will be hammered home at eight Live Earth concerts on seven continents on Saturday. In Johannesburg, that message has dictated the choice of materials in what is being billed as a carbon-neutral concert.
The Nigerian kidnappers of a three-year-old British girl have demanded money and negotiations to secure her release are about to start, the girl’s mother told Reuters on Friday. The toddler, Margaret Hill, was snatched on Thursday morning from the car in which she was being driven to school in Port Harcourt.
Photographs of soldiers’ garments show the contradictions of war, writes Tanya Farber.