The well-coordinated bomb attacks on Mumbai’s rail network that left 183 dead bore the hallmarks of Islamic militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, a senior officer said on Wednesday. Police, however, said they were awaiting test results from evidence at the scene of the blasts including several commonly-used timing devices.
Nelson Mandela’s legacy of tolerance was celebrated in Johannesburg on Wednesday. ”For me, the meaning of Mandela is the idea of plurality and tolerance of ideas. That’s the biggest challenge facing our country today,” said Witwatersrand University academic Xolela Mangcu.
A junior minister handed control of the Somali capital’s sea port to Islamic militia on Wednesday, a day after they defeated hundreds of fighters who were resisting the group’s strict Qur’anic rule. The radical Supreme Islamic Courts Council’s fighters consolidated its grip on Mogadishu following ferocious fighting that ended on Tuesday.
Gauteng residents have been promised more visible policing, more roadblocks and improved 10111 call centres as part of an intensive new crime-fighting strategy to be implemented over the next six months — although an analyst has pointed out that parts of the strategy look like "more of the same".
A senior official in the Western Cape’s department of environmental affairs was on Wednesday accused of racism by corruption accused David Malatsi. Malatsi, a former environment and development planning minister in the province, was being cross-examined by prosecutor Bruce Morrison in the Bellville Regional Court.
The tiny South Pacific Ocean archipelago of Vanuatu is the happiest country on Earth, according to a study published on Wednesday measuring people’s well-being and their impact on the environment. Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica and Panama complete the top five in the Happy Planet Index, compiled by the British think tank New Economics Foundation.
It costs a pretty penny to mint one United States cent. With the prices of zinc and copper going through the roof, the smallest US denomination is now worth more as a commodity than a currency, prompting Americans to wonder whether they should drop the little coin with Abraham Lincoln on its face down the well for good.
The <i>MySpace</i> website deemed a virtual clubhouse where teenagers bare details of their lives has eclipsed internet oldster <i>Yahoo!</i> as the most popular website in the United States, a research firm said on Tuesday. Yahoo! rejected the claim as "misleading" because it ranked the search engine’s domains such as search, news, and e-mail separately instead of adding them together.
The JSE was in positive territory in noon trade on Wednesday, propelled by higher precious-metals prices and stronger world markets. Volumes were again light, however, as players remained nervous about committing money to the market in a big way. By midday, the all-share index added 1,5%.
More and more United States police dogs are enjoying similar protection to their human partners in fighting crime. The latest group are the dogs of one Southern California town who will be strutting the streets this week with the new bulletproof vests. Prompted by the shooting death of a police dog last year, an anonymous donor in Glendale, gave funds to bulletproof the four dogs of his community’s K-9 unit.