A new United Nations agreement to track trade in arms is attacked on Thursday as toothless and riddled with loopholes by human rights groups which have seen a copy of the secret deal. The agreement, to be discussed at the UN on Thursday, excludes ammunition, shells and explosives.
Tens of thousands of Filipinos marched through the financial district of Manila on Wednesday demanding that President Gloria Arroyo resign over allegations that she tried to rig last year’s presidential election. One of the protest organisers, Wilson Fortaleza, described the march as ”a preview for a bigger storm”.
About 700 illegal occupants were evicted from a Bree Street office building in central Johannesburg on Thursday. The building was pronounced unsafe by the Johannesburg City Council. A municipal spokesperson said between 500 and 700 people were evicted, and those left homeless said they were ”desperate, confused and stranded”.
Thin Sandar, a chicken-seller in Myanmar, had always dreamed of being a man. When she inexplicably grew a penis last month, the 21-year-old treated it as an awe-inspiring omen — as have the thousands of stunned villagers who have travelled to a pagoda to see him.
A corpse caused a traffic jam on a Dallas, Texas, highway after it fell off a pick-up truck late on Tuesday, local media reported. The body was being transported to a Shreveport, Louisiana, funeral home when it fell off the truck and landed in the fast lane, <i>The Dallas Morning News</i> reported on Wednesday.
Harry Potter is ready to cast a spell over the book industry this weekend, as the sixth volume in the boy-wizard series looks set to become the world’s biggest-selling novel as soon as it goes on sale. In South Africa, the price for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is set to range from R129 to R249 a copy.
An astronomer has identified a planet with three suns far away in the galaxy — the first of a class dubbed ”Tatooine planets” after the home of Luke Skywalker, the young hero of the Star Wars films. The stars are about as close to each other as Saturn is to the sun.
Investec economist Annabel Bishop says the bank is forecasting a fixed investment growth rate of 7% a year that, in the absence of significant domestic savings, means the current account is likely to remain in deficit. "This would be exacerbated by the further importation of military equipment under the South African-Europe arms deal," she adds.
United States First Lady Laura Bush says she is looking to Rwandan President Paul Kagame to suggest how the world can make sure that a genocide his country experienced more than a decade ago is not repeated in Sudan’s Darfur region, or anywhere else. Bush was closing out a trip through Africa with a visit on Thursday to Rwanda.
Two South African pilots arrested in Zimbabwe last year over an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea will be released this month after serving two-thirds of their 16-month prison terms, their lawyer said on Thursday. The two men were jailed by a Harare magistrate last September.