Eight people have been arrested in connection with the death of several people on trains in Gauteng recently, the police and Metrorail said on Thursday. The group was arrested on the West Rand and in Pretoria and would face charges of attempted murder, Senior Superintendent Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said in a statement.
Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who has been comatose in a Jerusalem hospital since suffering a stroke in January, will be moved next week to a rehabilitation clinic, an official said. ”Sharon is going to move to the Sheba Medical Centre at the beginning of next week,” Yael Bosem Levy, a spokesperson for the Hadassah hospital said.
At least 35 people were burned alive and dozens injured overnight in northern Benin when a fuel truck burst into flames while they were stealing petrol, official sources said on Thursday. ”We took 80 people into hospital, of whom 12 died. At the scene, 23 charred bodies have been counted,” Boniface Sambieni, director of the hospital in the nearby town of Tanguieta, told Agence France-Presse.
Newcastle midfielder Kieron Dyer was arrested after a woman complained that he had indecently exposed himself, Press Association, citing police sources, said on Thursday. Dyer (27) had been released on police bail without charge pending further investigation, sources said.
Eskom’s ”power alert” messages will be broadcast on South African Broadcasting Corporation television from Thursday night, the electricity utility said in a statement. Meanwhile, the situation at Koeberg nuclear power station will ”return to normal” by August, Minister of Minerals and Energy Lindiwe Hendricks said on Thursday.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions wants the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the African National Congress to clarify whether a senior officer of the public broadcaster made political statements at an off-the-record press briefing by the ruling party.
The March local government elections once again proved that there was no viable alternative to the African National Congress and its allies, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said on Thursday. In an evaluation of the March election, the trade-union federation said the opposition had demonstrated that it cannot reach beyond its ethnic strongholds.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) is to investigate the link, if any, between security-sector employers and African National Congress leaders. Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said such a link, if found, ”may help explain the apparent indifference of political leaders to the plight of security workers”.
Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is still banking on a check of spoiled ballots from last month’s super-tight elections to return him to power, according to a copy of a letter to world leaders reproduced in the media on Thursday. ”I hope to return to government after more than a million spoiled ballots are checked,” the conservative Berlusconi wrote in the letter.
At least three tourists were killed and seven wounded on Thursday when a bomb planted by suspected Islamic rebels blew up a tourist bus in Indian Kashmir’s summer capital, police said. The attack came minutes after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ended a meeting in Indian Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar.