David Beckham celebrated his return to Old Trafford with one of his finest goals in an England shirt as Sven-Goran Eriksson’s side imperiously brushed Wales aside with a composed 2-0 win in Manchester on Saturday. England never gave the slightest indication of losing control of the first meeting between the two neighbours in 20 years.
Rockets rained on Afghan cities and military posts and a huge truck bomb was seized as the war-weary nation prepared for Saturday’s presidential elections. The embassy district in the capital, Kabul, was among the targets as more than two dozen rockets were fired around the country in a 24-hour period, a spokesman for the United States-led coalition said.
Aphrodisiacal qualities attributed to the horn of the rhinoceros have rammed a hole through protective international laws designed to conserve the animal. Conservationists are aghast at the way proposals from Namibia and South Africa, to allow export quotas for trophy hunting of the black rhinoceros, have been accepted at the 13th Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).
The International Monetary Fund, to which Zimbabwe owes -million in arrears, is to close its office at the end of the month after 11 years in Harare, a move the state-controlled press described as politically driven.
The British government said on Friday it was investigating a report on a Middle East television station that hostage Kenneth Bigley had been killed by his captors in Iraq.
”We are trying urgently to corroborate reports that Mr Bigley has been killed, but have not yet done so,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.
Libya and Liberia should pay reparations to Sierra Leone for backing rebels who waged one of the most savage wars in modern history, an independent truth and reconciliation commission said in a report on Friday. ”Libya … should make financial contributions to the War Victims Fund,” the commission said.
Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, has reported new polio cases just as the government intensified efforts to eradicate the deadly disease, officials said on Friday. The Nigerian cases coincided with the the biggest polio-eradication campaign ever launched in Africa, which was initiated simultaneously in 23 sub-Saharan countries on Friday, with the goal of immunising 80-million children under five over the next four days.
The Boeremag treason trial was delayed in the Pretoria High Court on Friday after an alleged altercation between suspected leader Tom Vorster and a fellow accused.
Vorster had to be rushed for medical treatment after he lost his balance and tumbled down stairs between the court cells and the courtroom following the alleged altercation on Friday morning.
A group calling itself ”Brigades of the Martyrs Abdullah al-Azzam” and claiming to be part of Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility on Friday for the bomb blasts targeting Israeli tourists in Egypt, in a statement posted on an Islamist website. Meanwhile, in the devastated wing of Egypt’s Taba Hilton hotel, tourists struggled to free the bodies of two people skewered on tangled metal.
Twelve people were killed and the bride at a wedding party was among the wounded when US warplanes bombed the rebel-held Iraqi city of Fallujah early on Friday, doctors said. The US military said it was a ”precision strike” targeting leaders of Iraq’s most wanted man, the Al-Qaeda-linked militant Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.