Pirates slaughtered 30 seafarers worldwide in the first six months of this year — the highest toll in more than a decade — and governments need to boost patrols in hot spots at sea to curb the violence, a maritime group said this week. The 30 killings reported globally from January until June compared to 16 during the same months last year, despite a decline overall in pirate attacks.
Filming got under way in Kigali on Saturday for the latest feature film on the Rwandan genocide, Shooting Dogs, which portrays the United Nations as having betrayed the Rwandan people in 1994. The film, funded mainly by BBC Films and set to be released next year, has been a year in development and pre-production in Rwanda has been going on for the past two months.
A simple, if frightening, account on an obscure American website of a plane flight has become something else in the paranoid world of post-9/11 air travel. Annie Jacobsen’s tale of flying to Los Angeles with 14 ‘Middle Eastern-looking’ men quickly generated a storm of controversy.
A row over an apparent relaxation in prison conditions for Italy’s jailed mobsters is reigniting suspicions in Italy over its government’s alleged relationship with the Mafia. Leading mobsters such as Pietro Vernengo, known as ‘Bazooka Eyes’ because of his terrifying gaze, are reportedly enjoying a surreptitious easing in their high-security regimes under Silvio Berlusconi’s government.
National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka has asked to resign from his post, the Sunday Times reports. ”Ngcuka is the latest victim of the political fallout from the Scorpions’ investigations of alleged corruption by Deputy President Jacob Zuma,” the report read.
SA Football Association (Safa) president Molefi Oliphant, 2010 Bid Committee chairperson Irvin Khoza and CEO Danny Jordaan will be receive about R7,5-million each for their efforts in the bidding for South Africa hosting the 2010 soccer World Cup, SABC radio news reports.
The death toll in Sudan’s western Darfur province is at least 30 000 and could be as high as 50 000, United Nations emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said on Friday. ”Among the one-million people [displaced] … it could be by now anywhere between 30 000 and 50 000 deaths already. And these are preventable,” said the UN deputy secretary general for humanitarian affairs.
Britain denied on Friday that its outgoing ambassador snubbed President Robert Mugabe by slipping quietly out of Zimbabwe and failing to observe diplomatic protocol with a farewell visit. Sir Brian Donnelly left Harare on Sunday after completing a three-year assignment in Harare dominated by diplomatic spats.
Kenya on Saturday pleaded again with kidnappers to release three of its nationals held hostage in Iraq, saying it cannot meet the abductors’ new demands. ”We are now requesting that the kidnappers release the Kenyan hostages because their employer has promised to pull out of Iraq,” said government spokesperson Alfred Mutua.
Beijing has blocked 988 overseas websites and shut down 67 local ones as part of a nationwide campaign to weed out pornographic content on the internet, Chinese media reported on Saturday. The websites shut down during the special operation from July 6-21 included Hong Kong websites. The popular search tool Google was also inaccessible this week.