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/ 25 January 2006
French police who spent two years trying to identify a woman who was murdered by a blow to the head were relieved to discover the reason their efforts were failing: the woman died half a millennium ago. The skeleton of a woman in her 30s was found during an exceptionally low tide in 2003 near the seaside Brittany town of Plouezoc’h.
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/ 25 January 2006
Japanese police are investigating a 57-year-old fortune teller who has effectively started a harem and is living with 10 women, media reports said on Wednesday. The man has repeatedly married and divorced the women, all in their 20s or 30s, but they all live together in a house in Tokyo along with at least one child, the reports said.
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/ 25 January 2006
The jobs of tomorrow are here today — there’s just going to be a need for many more of them, officials at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting predicted on Wednesday. United States Labour Secretary Elaine Chao said the US has forecast a demand for millions of nurses and health-care workers.
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/ 25 January 2006
The negligible rise in the country’s employment rate is "a cause for great concern", Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana said on Wednesday. Reacting to the labour-force survey data released by Statistics South Africa on Tuesday, he said the fact that 658Â 000 jobs were created during the year ended September 2005 is encouraging.
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/ 25 January 2006
An Israeli rescue team pulled three more bodies from a collapsed building in Nairobi, Kenya, early on Wednesday, bringing the death toll to 17, as an officer said tests indicated anyone still trapped under the rubble is either dead or unconscious. Radar, acoustic tests and specially trained dogs indicated there is no sound or movement beneath the ruined building.
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/ 25 January 2006
The worsening humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe is making children more vulnerable to abuse, according to child rights NGOs.
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/ 25 January 2006
Two Eastern Cape provincial ministers have run up a R1-million bill for official mileage with their private vehicles in just 20 months, the Dispatch Online reported on Wednesday. They are finance minister Billy Nel and economic affairs and tourism minister Andre de Wet.
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/ 25 January 2006
The collapse of an impeachment bid against Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika has set off a flurry of resignations by opposition parliamentarians distancing themselves from the parties that had sponsored it. The United Democratic Front MP who introduced the motion in Parliament last year has quit his party to become an independent.
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/ 25 January 2006
While India celebrates Republic Day on Thursday, for many in western Gujarat state the date will bring back terrifying memories of an earthquake that struck with savage force five years ago. The quake levelled buildings across the state of Gujarat, killing more than 25 000 people.
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/ 25 January 2006
Ministers from more than 25 of the world’s major trading powers will start trying again on Wednesday to break a deadlock in global trade talks. Major players at the 149-member World Trade Organisation (WTO) appear as far apart as ever on the vexing subject of farm trade, as well as market access for industrial goods.