The Electoral Court presided over a tug of war on Tuesday over 2 666 votes that could give the African Christian Democratic Party a seventh National Assembly seat but leave the Azanian People’s Organisation with one. The ACDP claims the votes, cast in Khayelitsha on April 14, were wrongly credited to Azapo.
Self-confessed Boeremag coup plotter Lourens du Plessis on Tuesday told the treason trial in Pretoria of plans to involve members of the police’s disbanded Civil Cooperation Bureau in the coup. According to Du Plessis, he had a meeting with an alleged former bureau member who said he could get a missile — but nothing came of the plan.
Tensions between Nigeria’s rival Muslim and Christian communities rose sharply on Tuesday, as Islamic leaders addressing a 10Â 000-strong crowd warned of an imminent backlash in the aftermath of a sectarian massacre. The leaders issued President Olusegun Obasanjo with a seven-day ultimatum to put an end to the killings.
The United States army kept up a deadly battle against radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr as the US-British allies faced a grilling on Tuesday over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and foreigners came under renewed attack. US forces said they killed 13 members of al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia in an overnight clash outside Kufa near Najaf.
A 102-year-old Italian woman survived unscathed a fall from the fourth floor of her Turin retirement home, Italian newspapers said on Tuesday. Her fall was broken by a plastic playground house destined for a neighbouring preschool that had been temporarily placed alongside her building by workers.
Two people were feared dead and dozens injured after a powerful explosion destroyed a plastics factory in Scotland’s largest city of Glasgow on Tuesday, emergency services said. Up to 20 people were also thought to be trapped in the rubble and another 60 injured when the building collapsed after the explosion.
Another Palestinian was killed by Israeli troops in the Gaza City neighbourhood of Zeitun, Palestinian medical sources said, raising to seven the number of Palestinians killed there on Tuesday. Also, a 12-year-old Palestinian was killed on Tuesday when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile near a market in Gaza City.
The Zimbabwe government has told international donors it will not need emergency food aid this year because it expects a bumper harvest, state media reported on Tuesday — a few days after United Nations food agencies had to suspend a crop assessment in Zimbabwe when local administrators interrupted their work.
An appeal by former African National Congress chief whip Tony Yengeni against a four-year prison sentence for fraud was postponed in the Pretoria High Court on Tuesday to July. Yengeni sought the delay to enable him to obtain a full copy of the record of his trial on charges related to his acceptance of a discount on a luxury 4X4.
About 150 family members and friends of alleged mercenaries held in Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea handed over a memorandum addressed to President Thabo Mbeki at the Union Buildings on Tuesday, calling for government intervention. ”I believe my brother is innocent and does not belong there,” said one of the family members.