Australia cruised to a simple nine-wicket win with a day to spare on Sunday after New Zealand’s second innings was torn apart by a magical Shane Warne. Justin Langer hit the winning runs just before the scheduled close on the fourth day, after the New Zealand batting line-up had conceded a world record seven batsmen to leg-before-wicket dismissals.
The global drug trade is booming, fuelled by the demand from more than 200 million people worldwide who used illegal narcotics last year, new reports show. According to an as-yet-unpublished United Nations report, despite multi-billion-dollar anti-drug measures that have restricted some supplies, the market is as insatiable as ever.
Amid the bundles of closely-typed paperwork and legal tomes, the lawyers flourish and stab their ballpoint pens at scrawled sketches of family trees on their open notebooks. The scribbled charts are helping them to keep track of the dips and twists of some of the most gruesome stories of depravity ever to be brought to light in a French court.
A German businessman suspected of taking part in an international smuggling ring to supply nuclear know-how will face trial in South Africa, the German weekly Der Spiegel reports in its Monday issue. Gerhard Wisser (66) was arrested last September in South Africa and charged with four counts of contravening the Nuclear Energy Act.
At 35 000 feet above the Caribbean, Air Transat flight 961 was heading home to Quebec with 270 passengers and crew. At 3.45pm last Sunday, the pilot noticed something very unusual. His Airbus A310’s rudder — a structure over 8m high — had fallen off and tumbled into the sea. In the world of aviation, the shock waves have yet to subside.
Bogdan Ghirda is paid 100 euros a month to do what most bosses would fire him for. From the moment he arrives at work he plays computer games on the internet. With only a few short breaks Ghirda (20) goes on playing furiously for 10 hours in the backroom of a run-down apartment block in Caracal, Romania.
The United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Monuc) on
Friday launched a new military operation to combat militia activity in the northeastern Ituri region. The soldiers, backed by combat and transport helicopters, were in action in the Penie region east of Ituri’s main town, Bunia.
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The prosecution in the Schabir Shaik fraud and corruption trial has asked the state to change Shaik’s bail conditions after he launched a verbal attack on advocate Anton Steynberg before the start of proceedings in courtroom A on Friday. ”I’m not scared of you, I’ll sort you out after the trial,” Shaik shouted at the prosecutor.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) on Friday evening dismissed comments by Zimbabwe’s ambassador to South Africa that the union body’s protest at the Zimbabwe border ”achieved nothing” and turned out to be ”no blockade”.
A rape suspect grabbed a policeman’s gun and opened fire in a courtroom in the United States on Friday, killing the judge, a sheriff’s deputy and a court reporter. Another deputy was wounded as he chased the suspect, Brian Nichols, who ran from the court in Atlanta, Georgia.