Oil company BP has indefinitely shut down the United State’s biggest oilfield after finding a pipeline leak, removing about 8% of US oil production and stoking fears that already high oil prices will shoot up further. Steve Marshall, president of BP Exploration Alaska, said on Sunday night that the eastern side of Prudhoe Bay would be shut down first, an operation anticipated to take 24 to 36 hours.
Zimbabwe’s book fair, once Africa’s proudest annual literary celebration, now has only one tale to tell — the decline of a country brought to its knees by political and economic woes. The cultural life of the Southern African country — books, music, film and theatre — is being strangled by a severe economic crisis many critics blame on President Robert Mugabe’s government.
Israeli bombs killed at least 18 civilians in Lebanon and cut a vital aid lifeline to the south on Monday in renewed fighting after diplomatic efforts to end the 27-day-old war stalled. Hezbollah guerrillas responded by firing more rockets into northern Israel, wounding one person.
President Thabo Mbeki attacked green laws recently, saying they were causing development delays that had contributed to ”a quite considerable slowing down of economic activity”. Mbeki’s statement came amid growing resistance among national and provincial politicians to environmental impact assessments.
The case against two senior Scorpions investigators arrested on Saturday for alleged involvement in a drug-smuggling syndicate has been struck from the roll by the Kempton Park Magistrate’s Court. The case was dismissed on Monday by the senior public prosecutor for lack of evidence, said a National Prosecuting Authority spokesperson.
The tiny Midwestern United States town of Twinsburg was seeing double this weekend — and researchers of human behaviour could not be more pleased. More than 3 500 twins, triplets and quadruplets came to a place named after its twin founders for what event organisers call the largest gathering of twins in the world.
The Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) has dismissed as "inaccurate" a report that the government has reneged on an agreement to sell the telecommunications infrastructure owned by power utility Eskom to the second national operator (SNO) that could result in further delays in introducing competition to Telkom.
Fifteen local aid staff working on tsunami reconstruction on Sri Lanka’s north-eastern coast, have been found executed after six days of heavy fighting between government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels. The Consortium for Humanitarian Agencies said on Sunday that a relief team had discovered the corpses in an aid agency office in Muttur, on the edge of rebel territory.
A May deal that was supposed to help end the conflict in Darfur has instead sparked months of fighting between rival rebel factions, according to aid groups, the United Nations and beleaguered African Union peacekeepers. Fresh clashes have left countless dead in the last two months and displaced nearly 50 000 people.
Sri Lanka’s army vowed on Monday to push on with a campaign to wrest control of an eastern water supply from Tamil Tigers, just hours after the rebels warned its continued attacks were a declaration of war. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) offered on Sunday to end a fortnight-long blockade of water to government land to defuse the heaviest fighting since a 2002 ceasefire.