Opposition parties in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have denounced parliamentary elections held on Sunday as ”fraudulent” while international observers have given the polls a cautious thumbs-up, according to news reports on Tuesday.
Australian pace bowler Glenn McGrath tempted fate on Tuesday when he named England’s stand-in captain Andrew Strauss and batsman Alastair Cook as his batting ”bunnies” (batsmen he intends to dominate) for the upcoming Ashes series. McGrath’s bold claim comes after he predicted a 5-0 whitewash to Australia in the last Ashes series.
Visitors to the so-called Baltic Riviera will be impressed by the region’s long, white, sandy beaches and pine forest where hundreds of elaborately decorated old wooden houses nestle between the trees. In the past, this peninsula, located between the Baltic Sea and the River Lielupe, was called Riga Beach. Today, Jurmala is one of the most exclusive resorts anywhere on the Baltic coast.
The Indian Parliament was adjourned on Tuesday amid a bitter attack on the government over a wave of suicides by debt-ridden farmers in the country’s main cotton-growing belt. Opposition MPs blamed the policies of the Congress party-led government for the suicides, which activists say are continuing despite an economic aid package.
A 3m-long crocodile gave bathers at Cape Vidal beach in the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park the surprise of their lives this week, media reports said on Tuesday. The reptile wandered down in the surf on Sunday, possibly from nearby Lake Bhangazi and ended up in the main rockpool.
A pair of Chinese blogs maintained by a banned Tibetan writer have been shut down in an apparent attempt to block her distributing her work online, French monitoring group Reporters sans Frontières said on Tuesday. Attempts to connect to the blogs on Tuesday were returned with a message saying they did not exist.
Ignoring growing calls for a ceasefire, Israel blasted eastern and southern Lebanon from the air on Tuesday and prepared to advance deeper into Lebanese territory to push Hezbollah guerrillas back from the border. Three weeks after the war unexpectedly erupted, one Israeli minister said its armed forces needed at least another 10 days to complete its offensive.
Rare, mother-of-pearl coloured clouds caused by extreme weather conditions above Antarctica are a possible indication of global warming, Australian scientists said on Tuesday. Known as nacreous clouds, the spectacular formations showing delicate wisps of colours were photographed in the sky over an Australian meteorological base at Mawson Station on July 25.
British families are buying houses and settling down in the picturesque region of Dryanovo in central Bulgaria as local inhabitants escape abroad in search of work. Under Bulgarian law, only foreign enterprises, as opposed to individuals, can buy land so the Davises founded a company called Outdoor Adventure and they hope to set up an adventure sports school and have horses for hire.
Badminton players in the United States have become the latest group to suffer the consequences of bird flu, claiming its spread is fuelling a shortage of top-quality, goose-feather shuttlecocks. They say that bird flu’s progress around the globe — and the resultant cull of millions of geese — has dramatically reduced the quantity of feathers available and pushed up the price of the premium shuttlecocks.