The noise of the two Black Hawk helicopters shattered the eerie silence that on Saturday had enveloped the city of Najaf. On board were a team of five Iraqi ministers led by Minister of State Kasim Daoud. They landed and were driven in a convoy, led by police cars with sirens wailing, through streets littered with the wreckage of battle, to the sacred Imam Ali shrine to inspect the damage.
It’s peace but the dead are everywhere
Deputy president Jacob Zuma on Saturday launched the extended public works programme, and said the greatest challenge was to mobilise all municipalities, provincial departments and other public sector bodies to implement the programme. After the Northern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal is the second province to launch the programme.
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, more than a year after the end of the war in the vast Central African country, rape continues to be widespread, steeping its victims in agony while their attackers almost always get off scot-free. Aid workers in Sud-Kivu province said in December that more than 8 000 rape cases had been reported there alone since the start of the war in 1998, or around 30 people every week.
It is famous for attracting celebrities such as Madonna and Demi Moore, but now the controversial religious movement Kabbalah, whose teachings are based on the mystical interpretation of Jewish law, is looking to attract a new kind of British devotee.
South African police spent hours looking for a 43-year-old man reported kidnapped this week, but at the end of a costly seven-hour search across the Johannesburg region, it turned out that the kidnapper and the victim were the same person. Andre Lottering, an unemployed cabinet maker called his wife on Tuesday, saying he had been hijacked on a freeway outside the city.
One of Mark Thatcher’s key business partners has turned ‘state witness’ and is alleged to have given dramatic new evidence to South African police investigating Thatcher’s role in the alleged coup to overthrow the President of Equatorial Guinea.
The revelation comes as speculation mounts over what British and United States officials knew about the alleged plot and when.
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In an alleyway next to Najaf’s Imam Ali shrine, Commander Sayed Haider rested on Friday. For more than three weeks he and his fellow fighters from the Mahdi army had battled against the vast firepower of the United States military. Now was a time to reflect. ”We believe that we are right. This is our country. This is our city. We will not accept that people come and occupy our land,” he said.
Six Cubans trying to reach Mexico spent two months at sea, mostly on a nine-metre boat, before landing on Mustang Island on the Texas coast, United States Customs and Border Protection officials said on Thursday. Five men were treated and released from hospital early on Thursday, a day after they were found on the beach. The sixth person, a woman, remained in hospital in a stable condition.
Nearly 300 people living in remote mountain villages in Taiwan were airlifted to safety on Saturday morning as continued bad weather threatened a fresh wave of mudslides in the district most affected by Typhoon Aere. Hundreds of rescuers continued to search for survivors and evacuate residents from Wufeng Township in the northern Hsinchu county.
An -million joint Japanese-United States project to research cosmic rays was slated for groundbreaking on Saturday in the desert state of Utah. The Japanese government is contributing -million to the project, which involves building three hilltop ”fluorescence” detectors and another 576 smaller detectors scattered over a 1 000 square kilometre area.