At least 35 people were killed and 25 wounded in a double suicide car bomb attack on Monday evening in the northern Iraqi town of Tall Afar, bringing the overall car bomb death toll for the day to 53. In the bloodiest attack, two suicide bombers drove cars packed with explosives into a crowd in Tall Afar, about 400km north of Baghdad.
An eight-year-old girl survived for more than seven hours buried under rubble in a recycling bin at a landfill site after being kidnapped from her home in Florida, raped and left to die. The girl was rescued when a police officer searching the tip spotted her hand poking through large chunks of concrete inside the bin where she had been dumped.
Five teenage girls were killed and 46 people injured yesterday afternoon when a school bus overturned in the Republic of Ireland. The bus was taking the children home from secondary schools in Navan, Co Meath, when the accident happened at Kentstown just after 4pm.
A frail but high-spirited Robbie Jansen was released from Tygerberg hospital’s respiratory unit on Monday afternoon, said his spokesperson Patrick Lee-Thorp. ”He is going into a period of convalescence and is not going to perform anywhere in the near future,” said Lee-Thorp.
The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is under growing pressure to postpone parliamentary elections scheduled for July, despite threats from Hamas to call off a four-month ceasefire if he does so. The Palestinian election commission said on Monday it would not be ready to hold the ballot on time.
In the idyllic setting of the Beijing countryside a short drive north of the Great Wall, a secret slaughter is taking place. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of cows have been killed in Dabailou village since the start of the month in a frantic attempt to stem one of China’s worst foot and mouth disease scares.
The businessman at the centre of the Nelson Mandela art furore said this week that he hoped the matter can be settled out of court. Mandela, in court papers, has accused his ex-lawyer Ismail Ayob and Ayob’s business associate Ross Calder of stabbing him in the back.
The African National Congress’s new discussion document is just that: a statement of ideas as a basis for contestation. As such, it provides a welcome opening for discussion of development strategies across the democratic movement. Unfortunately, the business press in particular has rushed to welcome selected proposals as a done deal.
A group of 14 centrist senators from the Republican and Democratic parties on Monday night struck an 11th-hour deal aimed at averting a political crisis over United States President George Bush’s judicial nominations. Under the deal, some of the judges selected by the White House for high federal positions will go before the full Senate for a straight vote.
The Office of the Rights of the Child in the Presidency is three years late in submitting a progress report on children’s rights to the United Nations — tainting South Africa’s image as a human rights champion. Child rights activists have slammed the office for failing to submit the report, which was due in 2002 as part of South Africa’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.