A renewed drive to immunise Nigerian children living amid the world’s worst outbreak of polio has run into fierce opposition from parents and Islamic teachers. As the five-day campaign approached its end, officials in the northern city of Kano admitted they would not hit its target of vaccinating four million under-fives against the crippling disease.
North Korea is deploying a new missile which may be able to strike the United States mainland with a nuclear warhead, a report in Jane’s Defence Weekly says on Wednesday. The authoritative military publication said the navy had customised a dozen scrapped Russian submarines to launch ballistic weapons of mass destruction.
Deputy President Jacob Zuma on Tuesday announced that South Africa would host a new round of talks on Burundi to finalise an agreement on power sharing and on holding elections. The two days of talks will begin on Wednesday at the presidential state guest house in Pretoria and will continue until Thursday.
Reports that 40 000km of the KwaZulu-Natal road network have disappeared are ”untrue and misleading”, provincial transport department head Kwazi Mbanjwa said on Tuesday. Mbanjwa said the decline in maintenance of provincial and national roads started in the 1970s and KwaZulu-Natal had ”inherited roads from a number of authorities in the province”.
During the year to June 2004, Kumba Resources’ Sishen iron ore mine achieved record production and the group also achieved record coal production and sales volumes. There were also higher sales of power station coal (1,3-million tons or 10%) to Eskom’s Matimba and Majuba power stations, while higher demand for coking coal and improved operating efficiencies increased other domestic sales by 4%.
Private Lynndie England, the woman who has become the emblem of America’s shame over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, showed no alarm when confronted with pictures of her gloating over naked and cowering Iraqi prisoners, a military hearing was told on Tuesday.
Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin said on Tuesday he wanted to create a truth and reconciliation commission for Iraq, modelled on the experiences of post-apartheid South Africa. Such a commission, ”based on confessions and pardons, would be a way to strengthen the feeling of national unity”, said Amin.
Chances are you’ve received several e-mails that promise you cheap Viagra, diet pills that really work, a chance to win a million-dollar lottery in some country you’ve never heard of, and several million dollars needing to be liberated from a Sudanese government minister’s bank account. If you have, then you’ve been spammed.
South African officials were struggling on Tuesday night to gain access to two nationals detained in Pakistan who are said to have confessed to planning terrorist attacks in Johannesburg. Foreign Affairs Department spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said South Africa’s diplomatic mission in Islamabad had failed to gain permission to visit the men, who were being held somewhere in Lahore.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=119782&t=1">’Terror’ pair were to ‘attack Jo’burg'</a>
France’s 35-hour working week is coming under increasingly heavy fire for undermining economic growth and discouraging job creation. The reasoning of the politicians who pushed for the shorter week had a surface appeal — high unemployment will fall if people in jobs work fewer hours. Employers will hire more workers. If only the world worked that way.