The correctional services committee in Parliament on Tuesday rejected a report on the escape of Annanias Mathe from Pretoria’s C-Max prison. The report found that Mathe had probably escaped by squeezing himself through a tiny window and then walked over the roof of the maximum-security prison.
United States President George Bush suffered a fresh setback on Tuesday when a top White House aide, Lewis ”Scooter” Libby, was found guilty of perjury in relation to events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Bush, whose polling rates are already the worst of his six years in office as a result of Iraq, watched the verdict on television in the Oval office.
Russia is to replace its military doctrine with a more hawkish version that boldly identifies Nato and the West as its greatest danger. In a statement posted on its website, Russia’s powerful security council said it no longer considered global terrorism as its biggest danger.
A Boeing 737-400 passenger jet burst into flames when it landed at Yogyakarta in central Indonesia on Wednesday, killing at least 49 people and leaving dozens more burnt and wounded, officials said. Witnesses said the front wheel of the Garuda Indonesia plane blew out as it touched down, sending flames shooting into the air and triggering a series of explosions.
The Martell Blues Rock festival offers punters a cross-section of our hottest bands in convenient packages. Dave Chislett reports.
For Merline Momo Azeufac, a teacher at Balefock village in western Cameroon, the days of fearing nightfall while correcting pupils’ work are over. She’s no longer hostage to the poor light provided by kerosene lamps. At the end of last year, Balefock received four solar panels to produce power, under a grant from the Rural Entrepreneurship Foundation.
George Aligiah’s book on Africa is a conversational and candid account of his life on the continent, writes Sarah Penny.
”Over there is the Protestant area. And there, behind the wall in the middle of the road are the Catholics,” says Alan Hoy with a smile as he tells tales of Belfast’s hardest working-class areas. His taxi carefully parked on the kerb, Hoy works for one of seven cab firms that now take the curious to north and west Belfast to explain all about what is still euphemistically called around here ”The Troubles”.
On February 12, a young South African man was accidentally shot outside the Bafana Bafana spaza shop in Motherwell township in Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela Municipality. Police claim he was shot by Somali shopkeeper Hassan Alow. Alow said thieves who had robbed his shop shot the boy.
The continuing genocide in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region was the world’s worst human rights abuse last year, the United States said on Tuesday in a global report that found freedoms were eroding in numerous other nations, including US allies Afghanistan and Iraq. The State Department also criticised Russia for a ”further erosion of government accountability”.