The African Union plans to transform a small force it was due to send to Sudan’s troubled Darfur region into a 2 000-strong peacekeeping mission, an AU official said on Wednesday. The pan-African body was already planning to send about 300 troops to Darfur to protect its observers and monitors in the country.
Thousands march on UN in Sudan
Britain and the United States on Tuesday night faced fresh allegations of abuses after a British terror suspect said an SAS soldier had interrogated him for three hours while an American colleague pointed a gun at him and threatened to shoot him.
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A car bomb exploded on Tuesday at an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint outside the city of Baqouba, killing at least four guardsmen and wounding six others, Iraqi authorities said. Earlier on Tuesday, a roadside bomb attack killed a local police chief and another officer in Baghdad.
Disgruntled municipal workers disrupted a meeting of the Tshwane Bargaining Council in Centurion on Tuesday and held officials there against their will. Tshwane Metro Council spokesperson William Baloyi said the group was angry about an apparent double deduction from their bank accounts in lieu of loan repayments.
About 35 workers may be retrenched from the Sowetan and the Sowetan Sunday World, following the newspapers’ recent purchase by Johnnic Communications, the Media Workers Association (Mwasa) said on Tuesday. The feared job losses stem from the purchase of the two newspapers from New Africa Publishing Limited.
While the overall composition of the student body at South African higher education institutions is changing to reflect the demographic profile of society, there is no room for complacency, says Minister of Education Naledi Pandor. Women — and particularly black women — are under-represented in a number of key study areas.
West African officials called on Tuesday for a convention to elect a leader for Liberia’s main rebel group, aiming to quell rising dissent within their ranks that could destabilise the nascent peace in the war-torn state. A leadership crisis within the rebel group has hamstrung efforts to extend the Liberian central government into its territory.
Two South Africans in Pakistani custody have told interrogators they had planned to attack tourist sites in Johannesburg, a security official alleged on Tuesday. ”They had hatched a plot to carry out terrorist attacks on Johannesburg’s main tourist sites,” said the official, who is familiar with the interrogation.
The man who pleaded guilty to murdering a Tshwane Technical University professor was on Tuesday sentenced to 55 years’ imprisonment by the Pretoria High Court. Professor William Papo and two other people were found dead in Papo’s house in Doornpoort, Pretoria, in January last year.