At least 19 people were killed across Iraq on Wednesday as two school teachers were reported slain by militants who slit their throats in front of their pupils, the government said. ”Two groups of terrorists have cut the throats of two teachers in front of their students in the Amna and Shahid Hamdi primary schools in the Shaab district of Baghdad,” a government statement said.
President Thabo Mbeki will on Thursday pin one of South Africa’s highest honours on his mother Epainette as she and 26 other heroes are recognised for their services to the nation. Among those to be honoured, some posthumously, are activists who died during the struggle against apartheid, two kings and a former head of state as well as former president Nelson Mandela’s biographer.
Conditions are ripe for multiparty talks on the future of Spain’s strife-torn Basque region, with armed separatist group ETA having called a ceasefire last month, the leader of the group’s banned political wing said on Wednesday. ”All conditions are in place” for ”a multiparty negotiation” on the future of their wealthy northern region, Batasuna leader Arnaldo Otegi said.
World powers struggled on Wednesday to show a united front over Iran’s nuclear drive, fearing Tehran will exploit any split to forge ahead with uranium enrichment. ”I would have thought that this is the time for the world to send a clear and united message to the Iranian regime,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in London as diplomats gathered in Moscow.
Thousands of striking security guards marched peacefully to the offices of G4 Security in Hatfield, Pretoria, on Wednesday, handed over a memorandum of demands and dispersed. A police helicopter, heavily armed police officers and a water cannon were on standby in case of trouble, but the march proceeded without incident.
Michael Jackson has returned to the studio and plans to release a new album next year, a Bahrain-based record label said. The label, 2 Seas Records, which is owned by Sheik Abdulla bin Hamad al Khalifa, son of Bahrain’s king, said on Tuesday that it had signed an exclusive recording agreement with the beleaguered king of pop.
The chief judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein ruled on Wednesday that signatures linking the ousted Iraqi leader to a massacre in the 1980s were ”authentic”. Shortly after the trial resumed following a two-day recess, Judge Rauf Abdel Rahman again adjourned the trial, until April 24.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a strongly-worded attack on Wednesday on Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, calling his regime a ”disgrace” that had brought the country to its knees. ”What the regime is doing in Zimbabwe is a disgrace,” Blair told Parliament in his weekly question-and-answer session.
There is no clear definition for the New Age movement. It is simply a term that lumps together a wide variety of beliefs, customs and practices, from acupuncture to astrology, Gnosticism, Wicca and various indigenous belief systems that have only recently been acknowledged in the West.
”Maybe it was inevitable that as the child of a reborn God-botherer and a misanthropic atheist, I might end up a little spiritually perplexed. My grandmother, a stout-hearted Matabeleland farmer, read her gilt-edged Bible every night, but was known to call in a nyanga (traditional healer) when necessary”, writes Nicole Johnston.