The case between mining magnate Roger Kebble, his company Skilled Labour Brokers (SLB) and the government of South Africa has been further delayed, Kebble said in a statement on Wednesday. The charges against Kebble relate to SLB’s dealings with mining company Durban Roodepoort Deep.
Legal custody of Saddam Hussein and 11 other senior figures from his regime was transferred to the Iraqis on Wednesday, according to reports. An international official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the defendants were informed individually of their rights as the coalition ceded legal custody of them to Iraq.
Saddam to be shown in public
The United Nations court trying key suspects in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide is suffering a severe lack of funds because 140 UN members states have failed to honour their financial commitments, according to the tribunal’s spokesperson. Of the -million pledged to the court, -million has not been forthcoming.
Lesotho, surrounded by its giant neighbour, South Africa, is facing a third successive year of food shortages. According to the United Nations World Food Programme, a poor maize harvest earlier this year has meant that the Basotho are in for another hard winter.
A United Nations helicopter on a routine flight in eastern Sierra Leone crashed into a hillside on Tuesday, killing all 24 people on board, a UN spokesperson said. The helicopter, belonging to the Siberian-based UT Air charter company, was on a routine morning flight.
At least 6 000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were left homeless after a fire gutted parts of the sprawling Pabbo camp in northern Uganda, destroying hundreds of grass-thatched huts where the IDPs had been living, local leaders and the army said.
Côte d’Ivoire’s political opposition met President Laurent Gbagbo on Tuesday for the first time in three months, with high hopes that a rebel boycott of the talks will not impede efforts to reconcile the troubled African cocoa giant. The day of talks aimed to revive a moribund, French-brokered peace pact signed in January last year.
The world must move quickly to avoid a repeat of the Rwandan genocide in Sudan’s western Darfur region, Chadian President Idriss Deby said on Wednesday. As Deby spoke, United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan kicked off separate visits to Sudan, both focused on Darfur.
Gun owners came under fire in the Pretoria High Court on Wednesday for the late filing of an application to have the implementation of the Firearms Control Act delayed beyond midnight. Their application was dismissed by Judge Ben du Plessis, who found there was no merit to the application.
The conservative African Christian Democratic Party has come out firing in support of a Christian picket against the Firearms Control Act outside Parliament on Wednesday. The picket was aimed at expressing opposition to the Firearms Control Act, which comes into operation at midnight on Wednesday.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=117976">Gun owners ‘hold court to ransom'</a>