Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez may be gone, but the dressing-room divisions and disharmony at the club remain. So, having been through four directors of football, six coaches and 20 players in just three years, Pérez finally sacked the man really responsible for Real Madrid’s crisis: himself.
A vehicle carrying a wedding party hit a landmine in Pakistan’s restive south-western province of Baluchistan on Friday, killing 26 people and injuring seven, provincial officials said. The blast ripped through a trailer being pulled by a tractor on a remote mountain trail near the town of Rakhni, about 300km east of Quetta.
Amid dark talk of foreign infiltration in Kandahar after a merciless run of suicide bombings, another, more benign, influence has already breached the city defences: the café latte. In a dusty square clogged with wheezing rickshaws and turbaned men, Kandahar’s first coffee shop has opened.
The United Nations launched an emergency response fund on Thursday for natural and man-made disasters to try to establish a permanent pool of -million that can be quickly channelled to emergencies as they happen. Britain has taken a lead in the initiative by providing -million.
Israel’s acting Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has said the country will draw its final borders within four years without consulting the Palestinians if Hamas does not recognise the Jewish state. Olmert, said that by 2010 he intended to ”get to Israel’s permanent borders, whereby we will completely separate from the majority of the Palestinian population and preserve a large and stable Jewish majority in Israel”.
About 2 000 people have lost their homes in floods that have hit central Malawi after storms in the south, a government official said on Thursday. The latest flooding came just a few days after heavy rains in the south left 6 000 homeless, destroyed crops and washed away bridges and roads.
Nine wanted criminals were among 150 people arrested in a police operation in nightclubs and taverns in Johannesburg’s Hillbrow district on Thursday night, police said. Spokesperson Inspector Kriban Naidoo said the nine were wanted for crimes such as robbery, fraud and forgery.
Women who are raped by someone they know are less likely to report and successfully convict their offenders, according to legal experts. This was despite the fact that the law does not distinguish between acquaintance and stranger rape. With stranger rape, if there is good identification, it can be fairly clear-cut,” said Lisa Vetten of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.
The head of the open-source software translation project <i>Translate.org.za</i>, Dwane Bailey, this week called on civil society to help localise software and push proprietary firms to do likewise. He was speaking at the Sangonet ICTs for Civil Society conference in Johannesburg.
South Africa’s third-largest gold miner, Harmony Gold, on Friday announced that it has acquired 44,99-million shares in Western Areas, representing a 29,2% stake in the company. The acquisition was made up by acquiring 37,37-million shares from fund manager Allan Gray and 7,62-million shares on the open market.