Gunmen kidnapped three foreign workers in two separate incidents in Nigeria’s oil-producing delta on Friday, authorities said. Expatriate abductions have become an almost weekly occurrence this year in the world’s eighth largest oil exporter, and thousands have fled the Niger Delta since violence surged last year.
Afghan-led forces killed 69 Taliban in a major operation against rebel strongholds in southern Afghanistan, while seven police also died, the Defence Ministry said Friday. Thursday’s push through part of the southern province of Helmand was the first ”where foreign forces have not participated”, Defence Ministry spokesperson Mohammad Zahir Azimi said.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has expressed its shock at an incident in which a Free State farmer chained two girls to a tree. ”Cosatu is shocked to learn that a farmer in the eastern Free State chained two young girls from Lesotho … to a tree,” Free State and Northern Cape provincial spokesperson Sam Mashinini said on Friday.
Late in the summer of 2009, as the hadedas chastised the barren thunderclouds, and the pastoral folk of Zimbabwe licked the last sooty shreds of nourishment off the burnt-out shells of tortoises caught in bushfires, a helicopter touched down lightly on a rooftop in what had once been Harare.
The South African media are covering the events in Zimbabwe with ”too much sensationalism”, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad said on Friday. ”There has been a tendency on many of these occasions to make generalised statements without checking the facts,” Pahad said.
Stocks at South Africa’s Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT) were 3,8-million tonnes on Friday, up from 3.2-million tonnes a week ago. The rise in stocks was due to the closure of RBCT for four days due to severe weather. Railing to RBCT during the past several days was not affected by weather, but has been below target levels, the sources said.
A painting by the American abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko is expected to fetch -million when it is put up for auction in May. Should it realise the estimate, White Center, a seven-foot high canvas painted in 1950, will become the most expensive postwar artwork sold at auction.
European Union regulators halted an antitrust investigation into Sony and Bertelsmann AG’s 2004 deal to merge their music units after the companies failed to hand in required data, the European Commission said on Friday. ”This means that the clock has stopped on this case until such time as the information is received,” the commission said in a statement.
South Africa’s proposed amendments to a draft United Nations resolution on Iran sanctions were designed to open discussion not scuttle an agreement forged by major powers, a senior official said on Friday. ”It is not written in stone. It is a negotiating position,” Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad said in a briefing.
Clashes broke out in Mogadishu for the third day on Friday between gunmen and Ethiopian troops helping the government fight an insurgency many fear could plunge Somalia back into civil war. Witnesses heard shelling and cannon fire near a former defence headquarters, the scene of repeated fighting between insurgents and the government and its Ethiopian allies since Wednesday.