The first major airlifts of emergency food aid to Niger are scheduled to begin on Thursday, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced on Wednesday. The Rome-based WFP says 3,6-million people are directly affected by food shortages, with 2,5-million of those ”in urgent need of food aid”.
The wife of slain Free State official Noby Ngombane and four of her relatives were granted conditional bail of R10 000 each at the Bloemfontein District Court on Wednesday. Ngombane’s wife, Nokwanda, her brother and sister and two cousins all face charges of murder and defeating the ends of justice.
The African National Congress must break its silence over the so-called Oilgate scandal, and explain how millions of rands of taxpayers’ money ended up in the ruling party’s coffers, says the Democratic Alliance. ”The exact nature and purpose of that transaction needs to be explained to the public,” the DA said on Wednesday.
The publishers of a banned Zimbabwean daily have launched a legal appeal against a decision by a government media commission last week denying them a licence to publish, their lawyer said on Wednesday. The Daily News and the Daily News on Sunday were banned nearly two years ago.
Sporadic incidents of ill-discipline, including the hurling of glass bottles at Cape Town city manager Wallace Mgoqi, marred an SA Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) march on Wednesday. The march follows a deadlock in wage negotiations between the SA Local Government Association and Samwu.
Lawyers on Wednesday lashed out at photographers sneaking pictures of killer Donovan Moodley in the dock of the Johannesburg High Court, where he is on trial for the murder last year of student Leigh Matthews. His furious defence counsel, Johan Pretorius, threatened to lay criminal charges against them.
An artist appealed on Tuesday for the return of an art work that consisted of a bottle of water on a plinth, saying he fears it was stolen and then drunk. United States artist Wayne Hill had devised the art work, a two-litre clear plastic bottle filled with melted ice from the Antarctic, to highlight the dangers of global warming.
Indonesian surgeons have delivered a 27-year-old baby from a middle-aged housewife who had carried the dead body inside her because she was too poor to have it removed, doctors said on Wednesday. A team of 15 doctors operated on Tuesday to retrieve the 1,6kg petrified baby from the 54-year-old woman.
Indonesian anti-graft protesters on Wednesday demanded an unorthodox punishment for the country’s numerous corruption offenders — coop them up in cells with bird-flu-infected chickens. The request was made during an anti-corruption rally outside the attorney general’s office in Jakarta.
A powerful typhoon drenched eastern Japan with rain on Tuesday, narrowly missing Tokyo but delaying flights and traffic and causing a sea accident. Typhoon Banyan hit Japan at Kamogawa city in Chiba prefecture, 70km south-east of Tokyo, shortly after 8pm, the meteorological agency said.