Lebanese troops trying to flush out Islamist militants shelled a Palestinian refugee camp for a third day on Tuesday before a fragile truce took hold, allowing aid trucks to reach civilians trapped there. Heavy fighting at Nahr al-Bared camp near the northern city of Tripoli resumed at dawn and subsided only in the afternoon.
The rain-savaged first cricket Test between India and Bangladesh petered into a draw on Tuesday despite a last-minute bid to force an unlikely victory. Indian captain Rahul Dravid declared his team’s second innings at 100-6 to leave Bangladesh a target of 250 in a minimum of 43 overs on the final afternoon at the Ruhul Amin stadium.
At least eight people were reported dead in fires or from exposure on Tuesday as icy weather gripped the country. In Nancefield in Soweto, two babies died when the shack they were in caught fire. Johannesburg Emergency Services spokesperson Malcolm Midgley said one was about four weeks old and the other about a year old.
Two hungry and thirsty crocodiles are recovering in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) after a week-long ordeal with their snouts taped shut, the Witness reported on Tuesday. The metre-and-a-half-long crocs were rescued from the Umgeni River near Wartburg by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and animal rights organisation Justice for Animals.
Israel said on Tuesday it could target Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and that a Gaza ground offensive was an option unless world pressure was brought on the Islamist group to halt rocket fire. Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh said: ”I’ll put it like this — there is no one who is in the circle of commanders in Hamas who is immune from a strike.”
British prosecutors accused a former KGB agent on Tuesday of murdering dissident Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and sought his extradition, throwing London and Moscow on to a diplomatic collision course. The Crown Prosecution Service said it wanted to bring suspect Andrei Lugovoy before a British court.
Interest shown by synthetic-fuel firm Sasol in the pebble-bed modular reactor is evidence of private-sector interest in nuclear power, Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin argued on Tuesday. He was speaking in his policy debate in the National Council of Provinces.
Independent Democrats (ID) leader Patricia de Lille has hit out at cellphone instant-messaging service MXit as well as South Africa’s blogging community, calling for greater controls and regulation by the government. Bloggers have reacted angrily to her comments, but De Lille says she has been misunderstood.
A hunter in Cameroon has discovered the wreckage of a South African six-seater aircraft and two charred bodies on a mountainside three months after it disappeared, government officials said on Tuesday. The twin-engine Piper PA-34 went missing on February 24 after losing contact with air-traffic control during a flight from Togo to Cameroon’s city of Douala.
A wheelchair-bound German stunned police when they pulled him over for using the road and found he was 10 times over the legal alcohol limit for drivers. ”He was right in the middle of the road,” said a spokesperson for police in the north-eastern city of Schwerin on Tuesday.