Saddam Hussein refused to enter a plea as he and six former army commanders went on trial in Baghdad on Monday on charges of killing tens of thousands of Kurdish villagers in a genocide campaign in 1988. The former president again challenged the legitimacy of the United States-sponsored special tribunal.
A United States teacher arrested in connection with the decade-old killing of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey arrived in Los Angeles from Thailand late on Sunday to undergo more questioning about his possible role in the 1996 murder. John Mark Karr (41) flew in business class on a Thai Airways flight that landed at Los Angeles International Airport at about 04.27am GMT on Monday.
Fifty-one people were killed on Monday when two trains travelling on the same track collided in northern Egypt in the country’s deadliest rail crash in four years. Two carriages were derailed in a tangle of torn metal as one train slammed into the back of another. Another 138 passengers were injured in the crash which also set one train ablaze.
Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) called on Monday for South Africa to play an unofficial role in peace talks after the government rejected an appeal for South African mediation. The LRA said it wanted members of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to participate.
Another two world records lit up the final night of the Pan Pacific Championships in Victoria, Canada on Sunday. But it was also a night in which Suzaan van Biljon bagged South Africa’s first gold medal of the competition. Michael Phelps was the first to break his own world mark, set in 2003, in the 200m individual medley after reaching the wall in 1:55,84.
SanDisk Corporation introduced the world’s highest-capacity flash-memory MP3 player on Monday and priced it to take a bigger bite of the market dominated by Apple’s iPods. The player features eight gigabytes of flash-based memory, expandable to 10 gigabytes, which translates into the potential to store as many as 2 500 songs.
Retirement funds should include hedge funds in their investment plans to ensure they construct optimal portfolios to protect South Africa’s limited savings, said Warren Brown, the head of fixed interest and financial modelling at Old Mutual. Brown was reacting to concerns about the lack of a clear regulatory and taxation regime for hedge funds.
The JSE was in positive territory at midday on Monday, boosted by rebounding commodity prices. London-listed Anglo American — the bourse’s heaviest weighted stock — dominated trade on reports of a possible $80-billion bid for the company. By 12.03pm, the all-share index added 1,29%.
Up to 88 migrants trying to reach Europe from Africa were feared dead on Sunday night after two disasters in the southern Mediterranean. In one of two fatal incidents, a boat carrying about 120 people sank after an apparent collision with an Italian naval vessel sent to rescue them.
Customs controls in free-trade zones worldwide must be tightened as smugglers are exploiting the easier movement of goods to shift counterfeit items, a conference on combating intellectual piracy was told on Monday. Smuggling of fake goods through these zones is a growing problem because of the mushrooming of free trade enclaves, said Richard Heath, the global anti-counterfeiting counsel at consumer goods giant Unilever.