Genet Kidane has been separated from her farm by a field of landmines since her nation’s 1998-to-2000 war with Ethiopia. Efforts to remove mines stopped after Ethiopia refused to accept a 2002 ruling on where the boundary should fall. And then there is military service, which keeps thousands of Eritreans ready to fight.
Heavily bundled crews are braving merciless cold to continue cleaning up the largest oil spill ever on Alaska’s North Slope. In recent days, the wind chill factor dipped to more than minus 57°C at Prudhoe Bay, as workers attacked the estimated spill of 223 000 litres that seeped into almost 0,8ha of snow-covered tundra.
Israeli troops, backed by tanks and helicopters, on Tuesday stormed a prison compound in the West Bank town of Jericho to seize militants held over the assassination of an Israeli minister. The raid came minutes after British monitors were withdrawn from the prison and sparked a wave of violent demonstrations.
The particles the Stardust probe brought back to Earth in January are a mixture of extremely hot and cold minerals pointing to a mixed origin of the Wild 2 comet, Nasa scientists said. Rather than the balls of ice, dust and gas astrophysicists thought they were, comets turn out to be celestial bodies of complex and varied origins.
Somewhere beneath the thousands of multicoloured kites that flash above the rooftops in defiance of a government ban, Rizwan Ahmed is mourning the death of his four-year-old son Shayan. ”You cannot imagine the horrible and tragic scene. My son’s throat was completely cut open,” he says from his humble home in a suburb of Lahore.
The case against three men, accused of murdering four-year-old Makgabo Matlala and gang-raping her 57-year-old nanny, was on Tuesday postponed in the Vereeniging Magistrate’s Court to March 23 for a bail hearing. All five benches at court number two were full of people from Lenasia and Vereeniging.
British male drivers waste nearly six-million hours a year on the road because they are reluctant to ask for directions, a study said on Tuesday. Men who are lost wait an average of 20 minutes before giving up and asking for directions, while women only wait 10 minutes before seeking help.
South Africans are confident that the 2010 Soccer World Cup will bring increased job opportunities and improved economic growth to the country, according to a survey conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council. Respondents also believed that the tournament would consolidate South Africa’s position in the international arena.
Syria’s internet has emerged as the vehicle for the bold voice of dissent in Damascus, where the state regularly exercises censorship and stifles domestic criticism. The electronic media has pushed the envelope of what is acceptable but at a heavy price.
There was no national energy crisis in South Africa and the contention that the recent Western Cape power outages were impacting on investment was dismissed by Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin on Tuesday. He said conjecture that South Africa had turned away an investor in a second aluminium smelter was not true.