The popularity of Iran’s controversial leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is surging almost a year after he won a closely contested presidential election, Iranian officials and Western diplomats said on Tuesday. Attributing his success to his populist style and fortnightly meet-the-people tours, the sources said that Ahmadinejad was the clear favourite to win a second term in 2009.
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Coming into the World Cup, Côte d’Ivoire was widely regarded as the most talented team coming out of Africa. Now Ghana is the lone African team with a chance to qualify for the second round of the tournament, and the vanquished Elephants of Côte d’Ivoire are pulling for them.
Nigerian police intensified efforts on Wednesday to seek the release of two Filipino oil workers a day after they were kidnapped near the oil city of Port Harcourt, a spokesperson said. "We are making frantic efforts to effect their release," Rivers state police spokesperson Ireju Barasua told Agence France-Presse.
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England finally got a result against Sweden it can live with. No, not a win — that has been too much to ask for. A 2-2 draw on Tuesday, however, was enough for the English to win Group B at the World Cup. Henrik Larsson tied it off a throw-in, getting the slightest touch to deflect the ball into the net in the 90th minute.
Israeli aircraft fired a missile at a car in the crowded Jebaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on Tuesday, missing targeted Palestinian militants but killing a teenager, two children and wounding nine people, clouding efforts to restart peace talks.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has written a letter to the group chief executive of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), asking him if there was any truth to reports that his corporation had banned four top political commentators.
The South African rand was hovering just below the R7,10 per dollar early on Wednesday morning in quiet trade. While the rand’s weakness appeared to be overdone, there was no sign of a recovery, currency traders said. At 8.42am, the rand was bid at R7,0678 per dollar from an overnight close of R7,0600.
A man accused of making death threats against two men suspected of the murders of actor Brett Goldin and his designer friend Richard Bloom appeared briefly in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday. The accused is the alleged leader of the Cape Town gang known as the Americans.
Helen Suzman, a former Member of Parliament and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was hospitalised after she fell and hurt her hip at her home in Illovo, Johannesburg, media reports said on Wednesday. The 88-year-old veteran anti-apartheid activist was reported to be ”groggy” after undergoing surgery on Monday.
Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor, once one of Africa’s most feared warlords, spent his first morning in detention in The Hague on Wednesday after being flown in to face war crimes charges over some of the worst atrocities committed in Africa.