Horns began blaring and firecrackers went off in the streets of Algiers on Thursday as supporters of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika began celebrating his presumed re-election before any official results were announced. Two and a half hours after polls closed at 8pm, long lines of white buses bearing cheering Bouteflika supporters began filling the streets of the city centre.
Nigeria said on Thursday that a number of military officers had been arrested following reports of a coup plot against the president, Olusegun Obasanjo. The president’s spokesperson, Remi Oyo, said ”serious breaches of security”, had prompted an investigation which led to the arrests.
Zimbabwe has sent six land ”experts” to Namibia in a move that could accelerate a planned expropriation of white-owned farms. The Zimbabwean land evaluators arrived in Windhoek this week to advise officials on how to carry out land redistribution, the newspaper The Namibian, reported on Thursday.
For the democratically elected leader of a country it was a strange motto but Thabo Mbeki seemed to relish it: no one likes me, I don’t care. It started as a terrace chant of defiance by fans of Millwall, the London football club loathed by rivals, and at some point South Africa’s president made it his own.
Long before I arrived at the Iraq frontier I was thoroughly alarmed. On our 320km desert drive through Jordan, my driver, Ziad, wound me up. ”Near Baghdad,” he said, ”many Ali Baba! Three hundred kilometres, very bad!” The previous night, waiting at Heathrow for a long-delayed plane to Amman, I’d seen the news: four unarmed Americans killed driving through the Iraqi town of Falluja.
Axed captain Heath Streak has threatened to sue the Zimbabwe Cricket Union for what he sees as his unjustified removal from the national captaincy. After failing to get ZCU chairman Peter Chingoka and chief executive Vincent Hogg to reinstall him at a meeting on Thursday, Streak said before returning to his Bulawayo farm on Friday that he would be consulting his lawyers.
Just one month after taking office in 2001, United States President George Bush bluntly told Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to bring terror kingpin Osama bin Laden to justice, the official September 11 inquiry was told on Thursday. Musharraf was also told to abandon support for the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan.
Sudan rejected on Thursday world pressure, led by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, for international intervention in the war-torn western region of Darfur, insisting it is taking its own steps to rein in government-sponsored militias accused of ethnic cleansing.
The countrywide strike of airport baggage handlers, which started on December 18, has been resolved, the Congress of South African Trade Unions said on Thursday. Workers will get a 12% wage increase and a 2% performance incentive, and all workers dismissed during the strike will be reinstated.