The case of ”Jack” Idema, the American accused of running a private interrogation centre in Kabul, could now lead to full-scale embarrassment for the US authorities. It emerged on Thursday that Idema had handed over to the United States military an Afghan who was subsequently held for a month by them in Bagram air base.
Experience the world over has demonstrated that economic growth and development requires strong guidance from the state "and a certain level of intervention in certain sectors", South Africa’s ruling African National Congress says on its website.
Turkish authorities faced strong criticism on Friday for starting up a fast-train service on decade-old tracks, after 36 people perished in one of the country’s worst railway disasters. One of the new fast trains derailed on Thursday evening near the town of Pamukova, its five carriages overturning and crashing into each other.
An eight-storey building collapsed on Friday in a busy fleamarket area in the Philippine capital, but no one was hurt in the accident, officials said. The five-year-old commercial and residential building in the district of Divisoria in downtown Manila first tilted on its side before crashing to the ground hours later.
President Robert Mugabe’s government plans to ban international human rights groups from Zimbabwe and cut off overseas funding to local organisations promoting rights, according to a draft Bill obtained by the AFP news agency on Friday.
Four of the 22 Boeremag treason trialists lost their bid on Friday in the Pretoria High Court to secure bail. Acting Judge Peter Mabuse dismissed the bail applications of Mokopane medical doctor Johan Pretorius Jnr and Bela-Bela farmers Gerhardus ”Oom Vis” Visagie, Rudi Gouws and Herman van Rooyen.
The Tshwane University of Technology has obtained a court interdict barring students from its GaRankuwa campus, where they caused hundreds of thousands of rands’ damage on Thursday. The interdict was obtained in an urgent application in the Pretoria High Court on Thursday night, a university spokesperson said.
Last Saturday The Guardian reported that a Mr Moammar Gadaffi of Tripoli had expressed an interest in buying an English football team, specifically Crystal Palace. By Monday, as both the club and his aides denied the rumours, he had subsided into a deep gloom.
Police began another day of intensive investigations on Friday into the kidnap and murder of Johannesburg student Leigh Matthews, but were yet to make an arrest. Matthews was kidnapped two weeks ago, a day after her 21st birthday, and, in spite of her father meeting ransom demands, she was found dead in a veld south of Johannesburg on Wednesday afternoon.
The strong rand has had a severe impact on a number of De Beers’s South African mines, MD Gary Ralfe said on Friday. Ralfe said mines affected include the Koffiefontein and Kimberly underground mines, the Cullinan mine, the Oaks Mine in Limpopo and its west coast marine and alluvial mines.