Colin Bower tastes the latest Indaba blends.
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The Angolan government signed a peace agreement on Tuesday with a group that has fought for self-rule in the country’s main oil-producing region, but other armed separatists said they would continue their struggle. Senior governing party politicians and military chiefs signed the deal along with Antonio Bento Bembe, who said he represented the Cabinda Forum for Dialogue.
The new Wembley Stadium, which was supposed to be finished for this year’s FA Cup final, may not even be ready to stage the showpiece game in 2007. The Australian construction firm heading the £757-million project said the first major event at Wembley was almost a year away.
Bombings and shootings killed up to 61 people in Iraq on Tuesday, including at least 26 soldiers, undermining the government’s attempts to show it can suppress unremitting violence. A roadside bomb attack on a bus filled with Iraqi troops on a road between Tikrit and Baiji, north of Baghdad, killed at least 23, the army said.
Israeli forces thrust into southern Lebanon on Tuesday and pounded towns and villages, meeting fierce resistance from Hezbollah guerrillas who reportedly killed three soldiers. Three weeks after the war erupted when Hezbollah snatched two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid, Israel’s security Cabinet agreed to step up its offensive.
The South African justice system needs new legislation to improve how it deals with young offenders, government advocates and United Nations representatives said on Tuesday. Children had the right to be treated as children no matter how vile their actions, Constitutional Court Justice Yvonne Mokgoro told a conference on child justice in Pretoria.
South Africa’s official opposition Democratic Alliance is holding simultaneous public events outside five South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) provincial offices as part of its nationwide campaign to highlight what it views as television-news reporting bias. In a statement, spokesperson and MP Donald Lee said on Tuesday: ”The DA will erect posters and distribute stickers outside each provincial SABC office.”
Suspected Islamic militants staged about 40 bomb and arson attacks in Thailand’s Muslim-majority southern provinces late on Tuesday, injuring at least one, officials said. The attacks struck government and civilian targets including the homes of local officials and a train station in Thailand’s three restive provinces along the southern border with Malaysia, they said.
Six more Somali government ministers resigned on Tuesday citing the 18-month-old administration’s "unpopularity" officials said. The resignations of Culture Minister Abdi Hashi Abdullahi, Water and Natural Resources Minister Muhamoud Salat Nur and four assistant ministers brought to 24 the number of ministers who have quit the 102-member Cabinet.