Japan was plunged into political turmoil on Monday when the Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was pushed into calling a snap election that risks destroying his party. The crisis was prompted by radical plans to privatise the post office, which Koizumi has put at the heart of a structural reform programme.
Government troops in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo killed 21 out of a group of militia fighters who attacked them at the weekend, an officer of the DRC army said on Monday. Colonel Janvier Mayanga wa Kishuba said the deaths took place on Saturday during clashes with so-called Mai-Mai guerillas who are allied to ethnic Hutu rebels from nearby Rwanda.
Messages on a telephone answering machine told of a Durbanville woman’s desperate attempts to warn her neighbour that intruders had entered his home, the Cape High court heard on Monday. Durbanville resident Pieter Theron told Judge Siraj Desai he found two messages on his answering machine, from the widow of retired Dutch Reformed Church pastor, Pietie Victor.
A Hong Kong official said one of the territory’s tiny islands could make a killing with a novel theme park based on its unsavoury reputation as a suicide spot, a media report said on Tuesday. The morbid suggestion to create a ghost-town attraction where guests were dared to spend the night in ”haunted flats” came at a meeting of local leaders on little Cheung Chau island.
Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer was buried on Monday as fans mourned the passing of the Buena Vista Social Club crooner, who died just days after coming back from a tour in Europe. About 200 relatives and friends attended the simple but evocative ceremony at Havana’s Colon cemetery, during which Ferrer’s bolero Mil congojas played in the background.
Ten protesters were injured, two seriously, in Germiston and over 40 arrested in Pinetown in clashes between police and protesting municipal workers on Monday. Ekhurhuleni metro police spokesperson Vusi Mabanga said that protesters marching in central Germiston started breaking traffic lights and littering.
Sudan said on Monday it had formed a committee to probe the death of first vice president and former rebel leader John Garang when a Ugandan helicopter crashed on its way to south Sudan from Uganda. ”A higher national committee has been formed to investigate the crash of Dr John Garang’s aircraft in southern Sudan,” Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters in Khartoum.
They’re being bred now by the millions, the mutants, created to carry the ghastliest of diseases for the benefit of the human race. Since researchers published the mouse’s entire genetic make-up in map form three years ago, increasingly exotic rodents are being created with relative ease.
Ronald Matsito has been unable to pick up the pieces since his home of 15 years and his small hardware shop were bulldozed two months ago during the Zimbabwe government’s clean up campaign. ”I can’t see a way forward,” says Matsito (55) a father of five who lives in Mufakose. ”I’ve lost everything.”
A new study sheds new light on euthanasia in The Netherlands, the first country to legalise it for terminally ill people, finding that nearly one in eight adult patients who requested mercy killings decided not to go through with it. Nearly half of the euthanasia requests were carried out.