When David Beckham came off the field after 65 minutes on Sunday, he looked doomed to leave Real Madrid empty-handed. But his teammates provided the send-off he dearly wanted with a 3-1 win over Mallorca which gave Real Madrid a record 30th Spanish league title.
If rising sea levels force the people of the Maldive Islands to seek new homes, who will look after them in a world already turning warier of refugees? The daunting prospect of mass population movements set off by climate change and environmental disasters poses an imminent new challenge.
A large explosion struck Mogadishu on Monday near the venue where a national reconciliation conference is due to be held next month. ”I heard a loud explosion that shook the whole ground near me. I saw a burning car thrown high in the sky by the intesity of the explosion,” witness Abdullahi Yere told Reuters.
Britain’s Lewis Hamilton won the United States Grand Prix on Sunday, underlining his extraordinary talent with a near-perfect display of racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Hamilton claimed his maiden win in Canada last weekend and is yet to finish off the podium after seven races.
The British aid group Oxfam said on Sunday it was permanently closing down its operation in Darfur’s largest refugee camp because of insecurity. With about 130Â 000 refugees, the South Darfur camp of Gereida is among the largest in the world.
At least seven children have been killed in a United States-led coalition air strike in a religious school in Afghanistan, the coalition said on Monday, amid rising anger over civilian deaths from foreign military operations. More than 120 civilians have been killed by foreign troops in Afghanistan in recent months.
A 12-year-old boy helped his dad fight off a gang of armed robbers in Pretoria in one of at least 19 violent incidents that Gauteng paramedics dealt with at the weekend. Netcare 911 spokesperson Mark Stokoe said three people died in the 19 incidents.
Gazans rushed to stock up on petrol and food on Sunday as Israel cut fuel supplies in its first concrete response to Hamas’s seizure of power in Gaza. The panic-buying came on another frenetic day of politics as President Mahmoud Abbas swore in a new government in Ramallah and outlawed the Hamas militias that deposed the Palestinian Authority in Gaza.
Sudan and seven other sub-Saharan African countries are among the 10 nations in the world most vulnerable to violent internal conflict and deteriorating conditions, according to a private survey. In the third annual ”failed state” index, Sudan was judged most at risk of failure.
In 1986 Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui called for a metaphorical bridge across the Red Sea that would reintegrate Africa with Arabia several million years after a natural cataclysm had torn the Arabian Peninsula from the rest of Africa. He noted that, just as in the view of continental pan-Africanists, the Sahara desert is a sea of communication linking states below the Sahara with their neighbours above the desert, so the Red Sea could become a similar bridge.