No African country is spending enough on defence, a conference on military budgetary processes in Africa heard on Thursday. ”Donor concerns about defence budgets are relative,” African Security Dialogue and Research (ASDR) executive director Eboe Hutchful told a gathering at the African Union conference centre in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
A German regional justice minister is proposing fitting long-term unemployed people with electronic tags in order to help them ”get back into an ordered daily routine”. Christean Wagner, a Christian Democrat (CDU) minister, also compares people out of work for a number of years with recovering drug addicts.
United States celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain is visiting Hong Kong — one of the world’s culinary capitals — and says the dish he likes the best is the suckling pig. ”Oh my God, that was a religious experience,” The South China Morning Post on Thursday quoted Bourdain as saying when he described the pork dish.
A man in his 40s armed with a knife burst into a Moscow sex shop and threatened a clerk before making off with an life-size inflatable doll and some sexy lingerie, RIA Novosti news agency said on Thursday. The owner of the shop, located opposite Gorky park, estimated the value of the stolen goods at 300 euros ().
A Spanish court on Wednesday saw video footage, taken by an alleged al-Qaeda member, of the World Trade Centre and other alleged terrorist targets in the United States that were supposedly passed on to the organisers of the September 11 attacks.
A fight between an elderly woman and a Cambodian Buddhist monk over an allegedly magic turtle required the reptile to be rescued and landed the monk in court on charges of impersonating a god, police said on Thursday. The trouble began when monk Khong Chantha (26) sold a turtle with Buddhist inscriptions carved into its shell to an elderly local woman for ,25.
The iPod craze has spawned a crime wave in New York city subways. Police told the city transportation board on Wednesday that 50 iPods have been reported stolen on the subways so far this year, compared to none during the same period last year. Cell phone thefts have more than doubled to 165 from 82 last year.
The exiled opposition leader of Equatorial Guinea, who British-led mercenaries sought to install in power in an abortive coup, surfaced in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, on Wednesday after vanishing more than a month ago, feared murdered. Severo Moto surfaced on Wednesday in an interview given to a Croatian news magazine, Globus.
The United States Senate committee assessing John Bolton’s nomination as the next US ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday widened its inquiry to interview several more potentially hostile witnesses, in a fresh blow to the White House.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was told by the government’s most senior law officer in a confidential minute less than two weeks before the war that British participation in the American-led invasion of Iraq could be declared illegal. In a legal opinion Blair has repeatedly refused to publish and never seen by the Cabinet, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, spelled out the dangers of going to war.