The call by the Independent Democrats (ID) for Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s dismissal is about saving lives, not egos, said ID leader Patricia de Lille on Tuesday. De Lille was responding to the ministry of health’s swipe at her on Monday for urging Tshabalala-Msimang’s sacking.
Convicted paedophile and serial killer Sipho Dube should be jailed for life, prosecutor Joanie Spies told the Johannesburg High Court on Tuesday. In pre-sentence submissions Spies said Dube’s crimes were premeditated and he had treated his victims with ”absolute contempt”.
An Iraqi Kurd told Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial on Tuesday how jets dropped poison gas smelling of rotten apples on his mountain village and aides to the ousted leader defended his campaign against Kurdish rebels. Saddam refused to plead and called the court a tool of the occupation. The Shi’ite judge entered a not guilty plea for him.
European economic growth is likely to slow going into 2007, as weaker exports to the United States and a softening of consumer demand and business investment take affect amid higher interest rates, international ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) says in its latest economic forecast for the region.
Gunbattles shook the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa for a third day on Tuesday as the United Nations and foreign leaders pressed President Joseph Kabila and an election rival to halt fighting between their feuding forces.
Eleven women and eleven girls were raped in Mpumalanga over the weekend, police said on Tuesday. Superintendent Leonard Hlathi said nine minors were raped in Siyabusa and four suspects were arrested. In one incident a 40-year-old man was caught in the act of raping a six-year-old girl. He was arrested.
At least 11 people were killed when militants engaged Nigerian troops in a fierce gun battle in the restive Niger Delta, police and military officials said on Tuesday. The incident occurred on Sunday night around Brass creek at Ekeremor in southern Bayelsa State when members of the Joint Task Force accompanying a Shell boat was attacked by the militants, they said.
Bomb-squad officers defused explosives strapped to a vegetable-laden pushbike at a market in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, on Tuesday, just hours after officials in the United States said they had arrested suspected rebel arms procurers. The bomb squad said suspected Tamil Tiger rebels had packed 15kg of explosives around a Claymore fragmentation mine.
Three Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) members who went to the Durban Westville prison on Tuesday to screen prisoners’ CD4 counts were threatened with guns and dogs by warders, they said. ”They are removing us forcefully, pointing [at] us with guns and they don’t want to let us through,” the TAC’s treatment project coordinator for KwaZulu-Natal, Cindy Blose, said.
The head of Egypt’s national railway authority has been sacked following a train crash in northern Egypt that left 58 people dead, security sources said on Tuesday. Transport Minister Mohamed Mansur announced late on Monday that Hanafy Abdel Qawi had been fired and his deputy Eid Mahran suspended pending an investigation into Monday’s crash.