![]()
England cricket coach Duncan Fletcher should be sacked after England were dominated by South Africa in Bridgetown, much of the British press said on Wednesday. According to the Times, the ”precise figures have changed from match to match, but the theme of capitulation has remained all too constant”.
Iran’s army will ”cut off the hand” of any attacker and is at the ready to fulfil its defensive duties, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday during an annual military parade. Iran is embroiled in a row with the West over its nuclear ambitions.
Zimbabwe was marking its 27th anniversary of independence from Britain on Wednesday amid an economic meltdown and spiralling political tensions that have taken the shine out of this year’s event. Veteran President Robert Mugabe, in power in the former Rhodesia since 1980, was due to deliver a keynote speech at the Harare football stadium.
President Thabo Mbeki on Tuesday launched the first of South Africa’s six new Nepad e-schools, Hewlett Packard (HP) said. The first school to be equipped with an HP computer lab, complete with servers, personal computers, printers, faxes, scanners, copiers and wireless connectivity, was the Maripe Secondary School at Bushbuckridge in Limpopo.
An attempt by First National Bank (FNB) to appeal a December court order forbidding it to continue with its Million-a-Month competition was dismissed on Tuesday, the National Lotteries Board said. FNB filed an application to appeal after a judge restrained them from conducting the competition on December 15 last year.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi have relaunched a regional economic bloc that is seen as a key step in restoring peace and stability in the turbulent central African region. The Great lakes Countries Economic Community, known under its French acronym CEPGL, was created in 1976 to ease trade and free movement of people.
The mayor of Nagasaki was shot dead on Tuesday in an attack which police said was due to an organised crime chief apparently enraged that his car was damaged at a public works construction site. The shooting was rare in a country where handguns are banned. Mayor Iccho Ito (61) was shot twice in the back at point-blank range outside a train station on Tuesday evening.
A Pakistani terror suspect extradited from South Africa and held for 18 months in Islamabad without charge has been detained for alleged links to the 2005 London suicide attacks, his lawyer said on Wednesday. Khalid Mehmood Rashid (25) appeared before a federal review board at the Supreme Court in Islamabad for the first time last week and his detention was extended by three months.
Manchester United put the pressure back on Chelsea after easily beating Sheffield United 2-0 on Tuesday in the Premier League. Wayne Rooney and Michael Carrick scored a goal each to give United a six-point lead over two-time defending champion Chelsea, which plays at West Ham on Wednesday.
Only a thin barbed wire fence protects Africa’s first nuclear reactor, once Kinshasa’s pride that today sits dormant on an eroding hill in a country wracked by decades of misrule and conflict. Last month international experts again voiced concern about security at the Kinshasa Regional Centre for Nuclear Studies.