If David Beckham had peered down from the 38th-floor window of his swanky Tokyo hotel this week, he might have wondered why the vast green park opposite was flecked with blue tarpaulins.
It is nearly a year since the image of a white officer smashing the face of a handcuffed black teenager into the boot of a police car was shown almost continuously on TV news across the US. On Monday that officer will stand trial.
It was time for a break at Clay Junction, Liberia’s front line about 50 kilometres north of the capital, Monrovia, and the kids wanted something to smoke. Boy soldiers in women’s wigs and girl soldiers in shower caps loitered by the road or practised penalties with spent sub-machine-gun cartridges.
An aid package promised to Zambia will be withheld until the government explains how it will offset its -million budget deficit, International Monetary Fund (IMF) officials said on Thursday.
President Thabo Mbeki on Friday urged financial institutions to help emerging black farmers by giving them access to finance.
European Union (EU) leaders meeting here on Friday adopted a draft European Constitution as the basis for a final blueprint to be hammered out later this year, Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis said.
Some 5 000 people on Thursday tried to leave Monrovia as a top humanitarian worker called for immediate distribution of food to tens of thousands living rough in the battle-scarred Liberian capital.
People living on the edge of Kenya’s oldest national park have killed nine lions in the past two months in retaliation for the loss of livestock, Enviroment Minister Newton Kulundu said on Thursday.
Two military observers from the United Nations mission in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been kidnapped in the town of Beni in the eastern Kivu region, rebels said on Friday.
Revelations that Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is being held at Yangon’s notorious Insein jail without even a change of clothes since she was detained three weeks ago sparked outrage on Friday among diplomats and activists.