Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia’s secret services to locate and kill the murderers of four Russian embassy staff who were kidnapped in Iraq, the Kremlin said on Wednesday. ”The president gave the instruction to the Russian secret services to take all necessary steps … ,” a Kremlin official said, reading from a prepared statement.
African National Congress Youth League executive member and former Randgold and Exploration director Songezo Mjongile appeared in the Germiston Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday on charges of tax fraud tin the amount of R1,8-million, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Russia’s super-rich oligarchs are currying favour with the Kremlin by pouring cash into the country’s bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Basic Element, the vast industrial holding company of the metals magnate Oleg Deripaska, announced on Tuesday a -million investment in a sports complex near Sochi.
Not all of the eight robbers shot dead with four policemen in a house in Jeppestown on Sunday have been identified yet, Gauteng police said on Wednesday. Police were also still considering whether to make their names public once their identities had been established, Senior-Superintendent Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said.
South Africa’s Commission for Employment Equity — which monitors transformation in the South African workplace — has come out with all guns firing against a Solidarity trade union employment-equity plan that proposes a code of good practice for affirmative action, which promotes the commitment of a non-designated group (whites).
The South African Broadcasting Corporation’s (SABC) inquiry into alleged blacklisting of commentators should be broadened to include bias against the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Wednesday. The DA’s Donald Lee said: ”The SABC’s coverage of the DA’s 2006 local election campaign was indicative of the public broadcaster’s aim to cut out the opposition.
South Africa must move away from its ”stubborn” obsession with race and focus on the socio-economic backgrounds of people to transform the country, political analyst Frederik van Zyl Slabbert said on Wednesday. ”If you make yourself hostage to a racist past you could budget on a racist future,” Van Zyl Slabbert said.
Three-million people remain short of food in Southern Africa as a result of poverty and HIV/Aids despite recent good harvests, the United Nations’s World Food Programme (WFP) said on Wednesday. WFP executive director James Morris said that although the region, plagued by drought in recent years, saw bumper crops, it paradoxically made the task of the UN agency more difficult.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged Libya on Wednesday to investigate the suppression of a prison revolt 10 years ago during which hundreds of inmates are believed to have been killed. ”Hundreds of prisoners were apparently killed at Abu Salim prison” on June 28 and 29 1996, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement.
Ethiopian forces killed 111 Eritrean-trained and armed insurgents in the north-west of the country, reported the government-owned newspaper Addis Zemen on Wednesday. The insurgents had infiltrated from neighbouring Eritrea on a mission of destabilisation, according to the Amharic-language daily.