A South African Airways (SAA) flight was forced to return to Cape Town International Airport shortly after take-off on Saturday after a passenger threatened a crew member with a weapon, the company said. An SAA spokesperson said the passenger had been subdued and the plane had landed safely at the airport.
Police in Chechnya killed rebel leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev during a special operation on Saturday, authorities said. Sadulayev was killed in his hometown of Argun, the press service of Moscow-backed Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov said. The city is about 15km east of the provincial capital, Grozny.
Spy bosses, rugby bosses, political bosses, diplomats and former deputy president Jacob Zuma were all on stage at the Absa Stadium in Durban in front of nearly 50Â 000 people for the Youth Day celebrations on Friday. Zuma’s message was one which stressed the unity of the ruling African National Congress and attacked ”analysts” who predicted the downfall of the party.
North Korea’s air force on Friday accused a United States reconnaissance plane of intruding into its territorial waters to spy on strategic targets. Its Air Force Command said that a US RC-135 plane being refuelled in the air had spied on strategic targets for hours after flying over its waters off the north-east coast.
One day prior to June 16 the pupils of Inkwenkwezi Primary School in Soweto gather in the assembly area. They are asked to think about the day thirty years ago when police opened fire on schoolchildren protesting in the streets of the township. The headmaster of Inkwenkwezi tells how, back in 1976, young people decided they had put up with racism and repression for long enough.
Former Liberian leader Charles Taylor could soon be moved to the Hague for trial now that Britain has agreed to jail the ex-warlord if he is found guilty of war crimes, a British diplomat said on Friday. ”It is up to the United Nations and the international community and the special court to work out details,” Britain’s deputy high commissioner in Freetown, David Dodd, said.
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England’s newspapers shrugged off concerns about the national side’s lacklustre World Cup form on Friday as they celebrated qualification for the second round and Wayne Rooney’s return to action. Rooney played only a marginal role in England’s late, late 2-0 win over minnows Trinidad and Tobago in Nuremberg on Thursday.
She returned to Africa for research on a new book and ended up with a teenage son. Carol Lee, British journalist and author of the newly published book <i>A child called Freedom</i>, is one of the initiators of The Soweto Project, aimed at bringing education to poor children in the famous township south-west of Johannesburg.
An Ekurhuleni business that illegally pumped toxic manganese fumes into the atmosphere has been ordered by court to plant 80 indigenous trees in a municipal park. Blue Sphere Investments Trading and its director, Nico Kruger, were also fined R100 000, or 10 years’ imprisonment. A third of the sentence was suspended for five years on condition that the business cleans up its act and the trees do not die.
One of Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s promises the day she took the oath of office in January was to urgently restore the electricity supply to the capital where power was cut off 16 years ago during the war. Among the ”key objectives and deliverables in the first 150 days of our administration” is the restoration of electricity to Monrovia”, she said on January 16.