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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands, imposed by drunk colonials playing with rulers and maps, which have kept them separate, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the unification.
A landmine hidden in a box exploded in a livestock market in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, on Friday, killing five children who were playing football and wounding at least 10 others, witnesses said. Eyewitness Abdirizaq Sheikh said the blast at a livestock market ”shook the earth”.