Italian coast guards intercepted about 250 would-be illegal immigrants off the coast of southern Italy on Thursday night, port officials said on Friday. A small motorised trawler was stopped about 20km off the island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, overnight, a Palerma port official told Agence France-Presse. It was carrying about 210 people.
Two runners training for the Comrades Marathon were killed and another airlifted to hospital in a critical condition after being run down by a car in Edenvale early on Friday morning. The two runners who were killed on impact were Richard Albrecht (36) and Joe Mendoza (39).
Her next stop could be the Union Buildings, incoming Tshwane Metropolitan City Mayor Gwen Ramokgopa said on Friday. Speaking to the National Press Club in Pretoria only hours before she was due to be elected new mayor of the capital city, Ramokgopa joked that she was ”very close to the Union Buildings”.
Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has formally asked Nigeria to hand over her exiled predecessor Charles Taylor, a spokesperson for Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo said on Friday. Taylor, who has been accused of committing war crimes by international prosecutors in Sierra Leone, was given political asylum by Obasanjo in August 2003.
Johannesburg can look forward to accelerated business and leisure tourism in 2006 and beyond, according to Eddy Khosa, CEO of The Johannesburg Tourism Company (JTC), which is spearheading the drive for growth in both international and domestic tourism to the city.
Delegates began arriving in Harare on Friday for a weekend conference at which opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai appeared certain to retain his post as leader of his faction of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). At least 10 000 delegates are expected to attend the conference that will see elections for all major party positions, said MDC spokesperson Nelson Chamisa.
Paris police have arrested 187 people in connection with violent clashes that followed Thursday’s demonstrations against new labour laws, the city’s police chief Pierre Mutz said on Friday. Mutz described those behind the violence, in which 46 police officers were injured, as ”louts” and said he hoped to identify them by the end of the day.
A 14-year-old boy was killed when security guards fired into a massive crowd of Kurds protesting local corruption in Halabja on Thursday on the anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s gas attack on the Kurdish town. Most of the demonstrators were students from universities around the Kurdish region and they expressed widespread anger over the lack reconstruction in the impoverished town.
A DVD purporting to show a married KwaZulu-Natal politician in a compromising position with an attractive young woman has reared its head, the Daily News reported on Friday. Its website said the DVD is being widely distributed in certain areas of the province.
Review by <b>Mphuthumi Ntabeni</b>