The Turkish military released details on Wednesday of a collision between Turkish and Greek fighter jets in disputed airspace between the two Nato allies, saying that the Greek F-16 "harassed" the Turkish plane and crashed into it. A statement said two Turkish F-16s and an F-4, "on a routine training flight", were confronted by two Greek F-16s.
Opponents to Montenegro’s push for nationhood said they would lodge a formal protest on Wednesday against its historic vote for independence, alleging irregularities. ”We must eliminate any doubt about the referendum,” said Predrag Bulatovic, the leader of a group of parties in favour of continuing the republic’s union with Serbia.
A Kenyan court on Wednesday charged a British aristocrat with murder in the fatal shooting of a trespasser on his ancestral ranch, the second killing he has been accused of in the past year. In a case that has reopened festering colonial-era resentments in Kenya’s central Rift Valley, Thomas Cholmondeley pleaded innocent to the charge.
World motorcycling champion Valentino Rossi said on Wednesday he would be sticking to two wheels and not joining the Ferrari team to race in Formula One. ”I will continue, at least for some time more, to race motorbikes,” the Italian told the official Ansa news agency.
Essop Pahad has a communications headache. In public he’ll only talk about the media’s problems. In reality, it’s him who has the bigger challenge. As President Thabo Mbeki’s right-hand man, Pahad is Minister in the Presidency, in charge of government communications. Last week, he told Parliament how all this was going (very well), and assessed the media’s performance (not doing too well).
World powers gathered in London on Wednesday to try to break a deadlock over how to stop Iran enriching uranium, as Tehran again warned against military intervention. Senior officials from the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia and China will discuss a European proposal at the closed-door talks.
The horror stories have become platitudes — a nine-month-old baby allegedly gang-raped, a pensioner raped by her grandson — to make the interminable list lend weight to perceptions of South Africa as a world rape capital. In the Western Cape, police statistics show that rape was the only contact-crime category to increase, by 8,2%, from 2003/04 to 2004/05.
A new variation of card skimming at automated teller machines (ATMs), which gives criminals access to customers’ bank accounts, has gripped the country, Absa said on Wednesday. The thieves, using a hand-held device, make a duplicate copy of the customer’s card, giving them full access to the customer’s account.
Security company Omega International Associates has denied its employees arrested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were involved in a coup plot. The Department of Foreign Affairs said on Wednesday that 26 people were arrested in the DRC on Friday on allegations of ”destabilisation of government institutions”.
The South African Air Force on Wednesday took delivery of its first two Hawk Mark 120 lead-in fighter trainers. The air force will receive 10 of the aircraft from Denel and BAE Systems in the next few weeks. Parts of the aircraft are locally manufactured, others imported and the assembly is done in South Africa under British supervision.