Ethiopia is facing serious malnutrition in 25 hot spots around the country and is in dire need of funding to avert deaths, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said on Friday. Unicef said they need -million to help support tens of thousands of children under a ”child survival” package to provide food, water and vaccinations.
Hundreds of toads have met a bizarre and sinister end in Germany in recent days, it was reported on Saturday: they exploded. According to reports, as many as a thousand of the amphibians have perished after their bodies swelled to bursting point and their entrails were propelled for up to a metre.
British campaigners are to mark a global anti-television week in novel fashion, they announced on Monday — sending out a stream of activists armed with gadgets that switch off any sets within a 7m radius. The campaign is to remove television "pollution" from public areas such as pubs and bars.
Poor financial accountability and transparency are hindering Kenyan efforts to fight corruption, the outgoing World Bank country director said on Monday. ”We are all aware that Kenya’s public sector functions with limited and weak accountability,” Makhtar Diop said at a financial management forum in Nairobi.
The Serbian officer who commanded the Kosovo campaign in 1998-99, General Nebojsa Pavkovic, is expected in The Netherlands on Monday where he is to be taken into custody awaiting trial on charges of overseeing the murder of hundreds and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Albanians.
Three astronauts at the International Space Station are scheduled to begin their return to earth late on Sunday, accompanied in the Soyuz spacecraft by about 50 live snails, Russian officials said. The snails went into space for experiments and are not intended as appetizers for the astronauts.
Candidates backed by conservative religious scholars have almost swept the board in the final stage of Saudi Arabia’s local elections amid complaints of unfair practice from defeated candidates. In Jeddah — a relatively liberal city — candidates endorsed by the clergy won all seven seats.
The biography of politician Patricia de Lille is the only place where three women suing her were named and their HIV-positive status disclosed, the Johannesburg High Court heard on Monday. The women are claiming R200 000 each from both De Lille and journalist Charlene Smith, and demand that their names be removed from the book.
Reports that up to nine elephants in Zimbabwe were killed and used as meat for Zimbabwe’s recent independence celebrations should serve as a wake-up call to Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk, says the South African official opposition Democratic Alliance.
In a new twist in the debate over outsourcing, about half a million exam papers from Britain’s main secondary school leaving certificate are to be graded in India to save money. The Daily Telegraph said that the wages paid in India to the people who marked the exam papers were a fifth of what would have been paid in Britain.