The prosecution and defence rested their cases on Monday in the trial of former Enron executives Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay after 14 weeks of intense questioning of the key figures in one of the biggest collapses in corporate history. The court adjourned and closing arguments will be heard next week before the jury starts its deliberations.
He braved rattlesnakes in the desert, and creepy hotel clerks in the Midwest. His wife left him, and he has stress fractures in both feet. But for Steve Vaught, a morbidly obese man who set out to walk across the United States to lose weight and find his soul, journey’s end was in sight on Monday.
Two Tasmanian gold miners trapped nearly a kilometre underground for 14 days were rescued on Monday, ending a saga that had gripped Australia. The rescue of the pair, who had been feared dead, has been described as ”an inspiring example of Australian mateship”.
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The African National Congress has invited its deputy president, Jacob Zuma, to discuss the resumption of his party duties after his acquittal on a rape charge, South African Broadcasting Corporation radio news reported on Tuesday.
Sony on Monday revealed key details of its PlayStation 3 video-game console, saying that two million of the next-generation game machines would hit stores in Japan on November 11 and in the United States, Europe and Australia on November 17.
It can be a delicacy or status symbol, a cure-all or even an aphrodisiac, but ecologists are warning that Russian caviar could disappear altogether as the Caspian Sea’s sturgeon population reaches dangerously low levels. The WWF conservation group has for the past few months waged a campaign to persuade Russians to give up their caviar habit for six years.
The road to Zarqa from Amman runs for 15km through beige hills peppered with limestone quarries, past factories, military camps, a scrapyard for big yellow cabs and a KFC joint. Trucks, taxis and military Land Rovers speed up and down, leaving trails of dust and black smoke. Like every other town in that part of Jordan, Zarqa is a place of filthy streets, traffic jams, donkey carts and grey breeze-block buildings.
Inside Peshawar’s cloistered mosques, high in the rugged passes of the North-West Frontier, and deep in the upholstered opposition salons of Lahore, there is growing consensus it is time for Pervez Musharraf to go. But who will replace the general president, Pakistan’s unelected leader since 1999, and how his departure can be achieved are questions so far lacking answers.
It has been nearly two years since the appearance of the first pictures of United States soldiers humiliating and torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. When the pictures first stunned the world, President George W Bush spoke of ”disgraceful conduct by a few troops who dishonoured our country”.
When my son was three, I had to take him and the baby to Khayelitsha to do a job because the nanny was ill. After a longish silence in which he stared out of the window at the world outside, he remarked: ”Mom, I think most of the people here speak Xhosa.” Typical of a parent born before 1990, I thought: ”How odd that he didn’t remark that they are black.”