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.
A bomb scare on board a passenger airliner from China to Australia forced the pilot to abort the flight, shaken passengers said on Tuesday. A note warning that a bomb would explode on the China Southern Airlines flight from Guangzhou to Sydney was found less than an hour into the journey, passengers told reporters.
India’s Tata group is picking up a 26% stake in InfraCo, a new South African telecommunication company, a news report said on Tuesday. InfraCo will offer long-distance telephone services and will build and operate marine telecom infrastructure.
South Africa’s real gross domestic product (GDP) at market prices on a quarter-on-quarter seasonally annualised and adjusted basis rose by 4,9% in the second quarter of 2006 from a revised 4% (4,2%) in the first quarter of 2006, Statistics South Africa said on Tuesday.
A Shenzhen company has been fined for sending bulk junk e-mail in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in China where more than 50-billion spam messages are received a year. China has a prospering cyber-world, hosting 111-million internet users, 700 000 websites and fast-growing online business, but officials say 60% of the e-mail Chinese people receive is spam.