With macabre scenes of self-flagellation and live crucifixion, a normally quiet Philippines village on Friday witnessed a bloody spectacle as it staged its own Passion of the Christ. The annual Good Friday ritual at Cutud, 70km north of Manila, attracts thousands of tourists and Filipinos for what is seen as the ultimate atonement for Easter — despite criticism from the Catholic Church.
The African Union (AU) on Friday welcomed a ceasefire deal reached by Khartoum and rebels from the western Darfur region and urged the international community to deliver aid to some 770 000 people affected by the conflict. The war has claimed at least 10 000 lives and displaced about 670 000 others inside Sudan and a further 100 000 have fled into eastern Chad.
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Tony Leon’s comments on the Western Cape during a Democratic Alliance rally on Thursday were ”utter rubbish”, the New National Party said on Friday. Speaking at the DA’s final Western Cape election rally, Leon said that since the ANC-NNP alliance had taken over, the province had developed ”the worst and the fastest-growing crime situation in the country”.
Special Report: Elections 2004
President Bakili Muluzi on Friday commuted the death sentences of 79 prisoners and freed 320 others in a gesture to coincide with Easter. ”The president has commuted death sentences of 79 prisoners to life imprisonment and set free 320 out of 9 500 prisoners with minor offences to mark Easter festivities,” said Smart Maliro, prisons spokesperson.
Cape High Court prosecutor Carine Teunissen on Thursday called for ”at least 20 years” jail for Mitchell’s Plain magistrate Sithembele Elvis Tebe, who a year ago shot dead an inebriated motorist in a hit-and-run road rage incident in Khayelitsha.
About 600 people staged a demonstration in Tokyo on Friday, calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops as demanded by militants in Iraq, who are holding three Japanese citizens hostage. The rally was held near the cabinet office and the Diet building following reports that the three were taken hostage in Iraq by an armed group which threatened to kill them unless Japanese troops were pulled out within three days.
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.
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.