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.
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.
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.
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.
Eight robbers armed with assault rifles were on the run in downtown Johannesburg on Monday after a failed cash-in-transit heist on the M2 East highway, police said. A BMW rammed into the back of a cash-in-transit van on the freeway near the Village Road off ramp at 9.15am, said Captain Schalk Bornman.
History repeats itself with mind-numbing regularity. I had just put down Canadian General Romeo Dallaire’s account of his failed United Nations peacekeeping mission to Rwanda in 1994 when another war exploded in the Middle East, and yet another feeble UN mission donned their blue berets and stumbled into the line of fire between the belligerents.
In her preface to Karina Turok’s book, <i>Life and Soul: Portraits of Women Who Move South Africa</i>, Mamphela Ramphele celebrates the strength of women, their resilience and resolve in the face of adversity. Echoing an earlier period of women’s struggle Ramphele reminds us of the resolute spirit that inspired 20 000 women to march to the Union Buildings in a direct challenge to apartheid oppression.
”Is it time to wash our hands of the country and find a stable life somewhere else?” The question in Girl Blog from Iraq was posted only last weekend by an anonymous young Iraqi woman whose weblog has now been adapted into a theatrical documentary at the Edinburgh Fringe arts festival.