South Sudan’s provisional government said on Wednesday it will stand by the controversial oil-exploration deal it has struck with a British company fronted by ex-England cricketer Phil Edmonds. But a consortium fronted by French group Total has claimed that it has rights over the area.
Former world chess champion Bobby Fischer is expected to walk out of a Japanese immigration centre on Thursday to begin a new life in Iceland, bringing to an end nine months of detention during which Washington has sought to extradite him to face charges of sanctions-busting. The move seems certain to dismay the United States.
Iraqi authorities on Wednesday claimed their biggest success for months in the gruelling campaign to quash the insurgency after Iraqi special police commandos backed by United States troops and helicopters raided what they called a ”major terror training camp” in the heart of the Sunni triangle.
The bitter and public family feud over the fate of a severely brain-damaged woman appeared to enter its final stages on Wednesday after the White House said it has done all it can to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo. A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Atlanta has refused to order reconnection of Schiavo’s feeding tube.
An explosion rocked a BP oil refinery on Wednesday, injuring more than 100 people and sending flames and black smoke billowing into the sky in a blast so thunderous it could be felt for kilometres. At least 14 people are feared dead. Workers were searching through rubble for survivors or bodies on Wednesday night.
<img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/199502/Zim_icon.GIF" align=left>Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, on the campaign trail ahead of next week’s parliamentary polls, on Wednesday accused former minister Jonathan Moyo of plotting a military coup to unseat him. Meanwhile, the huge numbers of British-based Zimbabwean exiles will watch the elections in their home country with keen interest.
Six days before Zimbabweans go the polls, it is safe to predict that Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF will take the election — despite the Movement for Democratic Change’s (MDC) spirited, if belated, campaign. Even the MDC seems to have accepted the inevitable, as suggested by the party’s T-shirt slogan: "Tsvangirai for president in 2008". But the MDC will not be the only loser in this election.
King Mazawattee the Jurassic, supreme monarch of Swaziland, has stocked his Cabinet with seriously bright okes. In fact, the manne had their ears pinned back by the intellectual vigour of Mpumelelo Hlophe, the Swazi High Commissioner to South Africa, as he explained that democracy is the government of the person, by the person, for the person.
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Tanzania’s government said on Tuesday that it will need -billion to halve the number of people who do not have access to clean water, which is currently 14-million, or 39% of the country’s population. The government launched its 10-year water plan on Tuesday to coincide with the United Nations’s World Water Day.