A daytime gun battle in the capital between Sunni insurgents and Shi’ite militiamen prompted the Iraqi government to tighten the Baghdad curfew on Friday as 22 people died in two bombings. The street fighting on Haifa Street on Baghdad’s west side broke out after militiamen loyal to Shi’ite radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army came under attack from Sunni Arab gunmen.
Pro-hunting campaigners lost their latest legal bid to overturn the ban on hunting with dogs in England and Wales on Friday. They had asked the Court of Appeal to rule that the ban infringed European Union trading and employment regulations and breached the European Convention on Human Rights.
A Swedish journalist was shot and killed on Friday in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, while attending a demonstration organised by Islamic courts, witnesses said. Unknown gunmen shot the journalist at a rally site in the southern part of the city where about 4Â 000 Islamists were demonstrating in support of the courts, they said.
The author of what has been described as the definitive dictionary of slang is gobsmacked, gutted, throwing up bunches, honked, hipped, and jacked like a cock-maggot in a sink-hole. A North Carolina school district has banned the dictionary under pressure from one of a growing number of conservative Christian groups using the internet to encourage school book bans across the United States.
Hypodermic needles have been designated as dangerous items — as opposed to prohibited articles — on passenger aircraft by the chief of civil aviation. This follows the alleged attempted hijacking of a local passenger airliner last weekend by a man who threatened the crew with a hypodermic syringe, demanding that the plane be diverted to Maputo.
Peace talks between the government of Burundi and the country’s last active rebel group resumed in Tanzania on Friday after a four-day interruption, a Tanzanian official said. Representatives of Bujumbura and the National Liberation Forces returned to the table in the Tanzanian commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, in a bid to meet a July 2 deadline, the official said.
The United States government has secretly monitored banking transactions around the globe since the September 11 2001 attacks, officials said on Friday, defending the programme as a crucial part of the war on terror. It is the latest in a series of covert measures that is likely to spark fresh concerns about potential privacy infringements and Americans’ civil liberties.
The United States military is relying ever more on space satellites to help wage combat in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, though analysts say that Washington’s space supremacy could be threatened by rivals in the future. The Pentagon is using sophisticated satellites that orbit Earth in a bid to track down its enemies and keep a round-the-clock watch on unfriendly foes.
Businessman Patrice Motsepe will be stepping down from his high-level position in business organisations to concentrate on black empowerment. He made the announcement at a media briefing on Friday after the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce’s (Nafcoc) two-day biannual national conference.
An historian is leading a search for a handgun that Nelson Mandela buried at a farm outside Johannesburg before his arrest by apartheid police in 1962, the owner of the site said on Friday. Nicholas Wolpe, the founder of the Liliesleaf Trust said the gun was of tremendous historical value.