Mauritania arrested several military officers on Monday in an alleged assassination plot against President Maaoya Sid’Ahmed Ould Taya, military sources said. There was no immediate confirmation or denial from the West African nation’s government.
Online search engine leader Google will surrender more than -million of its stock to Yahoo in a settlement that removes a legal threat hanging over its IPO at the expense of enriching a nettlesome rival. The agreement announced on Monday gives Yahoo an additional 2,7-million shares of Google stock in exchange for dropping a patent lawsuit involving a crucial piece of online advertising technology.
British backpacker and amateur documentary-maker Luuk Bouwman is the vanguard of the latest internet trend: video logging or vlogging. One step up from the now familiar internet blogger, vloggers upload personal video clips of everything from the US Democratic convention to what they had for their tea, via rants about tax rises and conspiracy theories.
The good, the bad and the average. The government’s new five-year national skills development strategy will be thrashed out in October at an indaba hosted by the Department of Labour and involving business, civil society and government representatives. The Department of Labour has praised some Setas for exceeding their targets and criticised others for missing them. We take a closer look.
Residents of Soshanguve were on Monday night threatening to dig up an entire road because it contained no speed bumps which they believed led to the death of a child. According to police spokesperson Percy Morokane about a 100 residents burnt tyres and blockaded the Morula Sun road.
Iraq’s rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr vowed on Monday to stay in Najaf ”until the last drop of my blood is spilled” as his militia fought gun battles across the country, including in Basra where a British soldier was killed and fiveothers were wounded. The soldier died after two military Land Rovers were set alight and al-Sadr’s militiamen fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at their patrol.
Four Japanese electricity workers were killed on Monday and seven others injured when turbine steam escaped at a nuclear power plant in Mihama, on the Sea of Japan. The reactor automatically shut down while rescue workers tried to help the victims.
A self-made millionaire who drew inspiration from the story of Pinocchio has bought a vast, derelict villa in the Tuscan town of Collodi — where the wooden puppet’s tale was set — to house a museum in its honour. Federico Bertola plans to turn the Villa Garzoni, a vast Baroque mansion built in the early 17th century and now classified as a national monument, into a ”museum for dreams”.
The European Union said on Monday there was widespread violence in the Darfur region of Sudan but the killings were not genocidal, a potentially crucial distinction which underlined its reluctance to intervene. ”We are not in the situation of genocide there,” Pieter Feith, an adviser to the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in Brussels after returning from a fact-finding visit to Sudan.
Sudan wins help from Arab nations
AU mulls sending force to Darfur
President Robert Mugabe’s government was accused on Monday of a ”widespread, systematic and planned campaign of organised violence and torture to suppress normal democratic activities”. The British charity Redress, which assists torture survivors, gave documented examples of 8 871 human rights violations from 2001 to 2003 to show that torture incidents were concentrated in election periods.