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.
A former Nazi who founded a secretive German colony in South America where opponents of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship were tortured has been arrested after more than a decade on the run. Detectives in Argentina captured Paul Schäfer, an 84-year-old German, on Thursday on the outskirts of the capital, Buenos Aires.
A former New York police detective who had a bit part in in the film GoodFellas and co-wrote a book about the mafia, has been charged with taking part in eight murders while working undercover for the mob. The charges include using an unmarked police car to pull over Eddie Lino, a mafia captain from the Gambino family in Brooklyn and shooting him to death.
The White House abandoned its uncompromising policy on Iran and its feared nuclear programme for the first time in two years on Friday by joining the Europeans in offering to reward Tehran if it halts its most ambitious nuclear project.
The Pentagon is planning to transfer half the inmates at Guantánamo Bay to prisons in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen, despite fears that they would face even worse human rights abuses than at the United States camp. The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has urged the State Department to ratchet up the pressure on unresponsive allies to take custody of the prisoners.