Waving flags replaced clouds of tear gas as tens of thousands of people in Kathmandu celebrated ”Victory Day” over their king on streets where protesters had fought pitched battles with police. Festivities that started late on Monday after King Gyanendra ended 14 months of absolute rule and restored Parliament, swelled to street parties by mid-morning.
Zanzibar marked Africa Malaria Day on Tuesday with an appeal for more aid money to control and possibly eliminate the tropical disease, which kills more than one-million people a year — many of them young children in Africa. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and causes wracking pain, fever and, if left untreated, death. It is the leading cause of death of those under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Egyptian forces on Tuesday arrested 10 suspects over the triple bombings that ripped through the Red Sea tourist resort of Dahab and killed 18 people, including foreigners. State media said preliminary investigations pointed to links between the attacks in Dahab and two previous strikes in the Sinai peninsula over the past 18 months.
Billions of dollars in aid will achieve ”zero” in Africa unless governments on the continent are serious about fighting corruption and poverty, Irish rocker and humanitarian Bob Geldof said on Tuesday. The 54-year-old political activist, who will be performing in Johannesburg and Cape Town this week, said he saw ”many, many optimistic signs and just as many crap signs” that African governments were cleaning up their act.
The Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has announced that women will be allowed to attend football matches in big stadiums for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Under a decree reported on state television on Monday, the president has ordered the head of the country’s sports organisation to provide separate areas for women.
No charges of corruption or tender rigging were pending against any National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) employees, NPA head Vusi Pikoli said on Tuesday. He rejected a Sunday Times report that NPA chief executive officer Marion Sparg and her ”entire executive management team” faced such charges.
The union representing striking security guards and their employers need to resolve their wage dispute without the Minister of Labour’s intervention, he said on Tuesday. Minister Membathisi Mdladlana said that both parties — and not himself — held the key to an amicable solution, he said in a statement sent from Cairo, where he was attending a labour summit.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has rejected a claim by the Department of Health that it is reconsidering a government’s invitation to attend the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/Aids. After initially being barred from going to the special session, the TAC last week turned down the department’s offer to be one of 14 civil society organisations to join the South African delegation.
It is worthy of a political thriller. The political elite in Paris is gripped by the search for an anonymous poison-pen writer who concocted fake allegations against leading politicians and businessmen. The so-called ”Clearstream” affair is the latest battle in the bitter rivalry between the presidential pretender, the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin.
More than 1 000 Iraqis who live south of Baghdad within the bombed and looted complex that was once the centre of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear programme are at acute risk of radioactive poisoning, the United Nations’ nuclear authority said on Monday.