At least 30 people were killed or wounded in running gun battles on Friday between Shi’ite militiamen and United States-Iraqi forces in Baghdad’s sprawling Shi’ite slum district of Sadr City, the US military and security sources said. The US military said the fighting resulted in the capture of a ”high-level insurgent leader” behind attacks on Iraqi and US-led forces.
![]()
Germany’s Lukas Podolski was named by Fifa on Friday as the World Cup’s best young player. The 21-year-old Polish-born striker scored three goals after coach Jurgen Klinsmann had selected him as part of a drive to reinvigorate a flagging team. He has now scored 15 goals in 31 appearances with the national team.
A Dutchman abducted on Thursday in Nigeria’s violent oil-producing Niger Delta is in good health but his kidnappers’ demands are not yet known, a spokesperson for Bayelsa state in the delta said on Friday. Gunmen seized the man, who was working on an unfinished Shell gas plant in Bayelsa, from a houseboat after disarming police on guard.
The Scorpions have in the past several hours arrested five people suspected of being part of an international drug syndicate and also seized drugs with a street value of over R250-million. The five people — aged between 35 and 70 — were arrested following an undercover operation that led investigators to a self-storage facility in Alberton, south-east of Johannesburg.
The four British Muslims who carried out the London bombings a year ago remain to this day remarkable for having been, in many ways, unremarkable. Their extremist views were little known, and their violent intentions even less so. Britain was mourning their lethal handiwork on Friday.
North Korea rounded on its critics in dramatic fashion on Thursday, warning that it planned to test-launch more missiles and would resort to ”physical actions” against any country that continued to pressure it to abandon its missile programme. It called the tests successful, even though a Taepodong-2 missile splashed down in the Sea of Japan 40 seconds after launch.
If the old adage holds true and one’s home is one’s castle, in the United States at least one’s bathroom is a palace where showers are kitted out with iPods and there are plasma screen televisions in the spa bath. Americans will spend -billion on luxury bathrooms this year — 10 times more than the United States government will devote to HIV/Aids research.
Casino owners in Atlantic City are counting the cost of a two-day shutdown caused by New Jersey governor Jon Corzine’s gamble to fix a ,5-billion hole in the state’s Budget. The city’s 12 gaming halls closed when 45 000 state employees, including casino inspectors, were sent home as politicians resisted Corzine’s plan to increase sales tax.
Government’s social sector cluster of ministries is making steady progress with delivery, Minister of Social Development Zola Skweyiya said on Friday. Over 3,4-million children under the age of 14 now received the child-support grant, he said during a media briefing on the implementation of government’s programme of action.
The government has politicised policing to the detriment of South Africans, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Friday. ”Far from removing policing from the party political arena, this government has actually aggravated the politicisation of policing to the detriment of the safety of its citizens,” he wrote in his weekly newsletter on the DA website.