Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of France on Tuesday, disrupting schools and transport in a nationwide strike to pressure the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, to withdraw his controversial new employment law. Paris police said they made 105 arrests. Officers were armed with guns of indelible ink to fire at troublemakers.
United Nations chief Kofi Annan on Tuesday appealed to West African countries to arrest and deny refuge to Liberia’s former leader and war crimes suspect Charles Taylor, who has disappeared from Nigeria. Taylor is accused by a UN-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone of masterminding a policy of murder, torture, pillage and rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
SA Rugby declined the Southern Spears’ request to meet on Tuesday before its board decides whether the franchise will play in next year’s Super 14. SA Rugby managing director Johan Prinsloo informed the Spears that the board of directors was too busy during its two-day meeting starting late on Tuesday.
<i>Mail & Guardian</i> business reporter Lloyd Gedye was named a joint winner in the category for new journalists at the 2006 Telkom ICT Journalist of the Year award ceremony, held on Tuesday evening at The Castle in Kyalami. <i>M&G Online</i> publisher Matthew Buckland also received a special mention at the awards.
The Cairns Group of agricultural exporting nations warned on Wednesday of "dangerous" consequences if major trading blocs do not agree to significant cuts in tariffs and farm subsidies by an April deadline in world trade talks. "It would be dangerous to assume that the significant moves that are required by major members can be left until the eleventh hour. They cannot," the group said.
A fire in the Johannesburg city centre killed 12 people and left 33 others injured in the early hours of Wednesday, Johannesburg emergency services said. ”The cause of death of all 12 appears to be traumatic asphyxia — they suffocated because they couldn’t get out,” spokesperson Malcolm Midgley said.
It might have been mere coincidence, or it might have been the result of a sinister conspiracy stretching back centuries, involving the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, and dark forces within the Vatican. Either way, the author of The Da Vinci Code and one of the men he has been facing in court found themselves locked in a new battle on Tuesday, with rival United States book launches on the same day.
The ruling Kadima party won Tuesday’s general election in Israel, according to exit polls, but with fewer seats than the Acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, wanted in order for him to claim a mandate for his plan to impose Israel’s final borders. In his victory speech, Olmert said he would press ahead with his plan to separate from the Palestinians.
The United States Federal Reserve, under its new chief Ben Bernanke, on Tuesday night raised interest rates by a quarter point to 4,75%, their highest level in nearly five years, as it sought to head off inflationary pressures and cool the economy. The move is the 15th the US central bank has made since former chairperson Alan Greenspan began raising rates from a 46-year low of 1% in mid-2004.
Prosecutors presented a strong case in the fraud trial of former Enron chief executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, but the defence still has a chance to win acquittal, legal analysts said. "I think the government should be fundamentally quite happy," said John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor specialising in white-collar crime.