The alleged al-Qaeda mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, boasted of being personally responsible for decapitating the United States journalist Daniel Pearl five years ago, in a new transcript released by the Pentagon on Thursday.
The Israeli army said on Friday it was investigating the alleged use by soldiers of Palestinian civilians as human shields during a recent operation in the West Bank town of Nablus. In October 2005, Israel’s supreme court banned the use of human shields as being contrary to international law.
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Zimbabwe and Ireland played to a thrilling tie in a tense finish to their World Cup Group D match at Sabina Park in Kingston on Thursday. Opener Jeremy Bray carried his bat for an undefeated 115 off 137 balls, his second one-day international hundred, to give Ireland a sniff of a chance.
If you were walking recently on a beach in Puerto Rico and saw a strange web address scrawled along the sand, or if you saw balloons released from a window in Chicago with similar hieroglyphics, then they can almost certainly be traced to something written on a napkin and left in an Oxford café by an undergraduate.
It’s a kind of social networking site, and it is generating huge amounts of buzz among the web’s early adopters thanks to a simple conceit. All <i>Twitter.com</i> does is ask: "What are you doing?" The idea is that it offers a way for individuals to provide more detailed status updates to their friends, family and contacts.
<a href="http://www.mg.co.za/specialreport.aspx?area=cwc_home"><img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/300732/Icon_CWC.gif" align=left border=0></a>That is what hosting the 2003 Cricket World Cup taught us. Forearmed with this charitable knowledge, those insomniacs who watched Sunday night’s jubilation in Montego Bay would have forgiven the West Indian organisers, and elected to believe the reports of those who were actually there who said that it was quite a shindig.
United States talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey is to open on Friday an innovative, environment-friendly school she has funded with the South African government to create a model state education facility. This comes as authorities at the exclusive private academy for poor girls that Winfrey opened in January dismissed complaints it is too strict.
South Africa’s central bank is willing to raise interest rates further if the inflation outlook worsens, the bank’s governor Tito Mboweni said on Thursday, urging consumers to cut debt. But he offered a reprieve to commercial banks, saying the Reserve Bank would hold off on raising reserve requirements to give them more time to curb high lending.
I was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1990. I’ve been taking antiretrovirals for nearly eight years. I survived TB meningitis in 2002. I feel healthier now than I did 20 years ago. Maybe that history should make me fear a new, unstoppable killer within the TB and HIV pandemics. But newspaper stories on XDR-TB (extensively drug-resistant TB) do not leave me quaking with fear of this new illness, writes Judy Seidman.
A broadband price war has finally begun in earnest. It is being led by the country’s cellphone operators sticking it to Telkom in a bid to capture more subscribers. The latest to join the fray is mobile operator Vodacom, which announced this week that from April 1 2007 its data rates will be decreased by as much as 61%, making it the cheapest and fastest broadband offering available.