United States space shuttle Atlantis landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Friday after a fiery descent through the Earth’s atmosphere that capped a two-week mission to the International Space Station. The shuttle touched down at Edwards at 19.49pm GMT, shimmering in the heat and sending up a plume of brownish-gray dust.
Rebels attacked an army base in Niger, killing 13 soldiers and taking at least 47 prisoners on Friday, the government said. An ethnic Tuareg group claimed responsibility, just days after it said it was behind an assault on a local airport. In addition to the 13 soldiers killed, 30 others were wounded at the base, about 2 000km north-east of the capital.
The hostage taker at a hair salon in Vanderbijlpark was shot dead by police early on Saturday morning. A single shot was fired, bringing to an end an eight-hour hostage drama around 2.10am. ”It’s over, he is no longer,” said police spokesperson Captain William Mcera. Both hostages were safe, he said.
Prime Minister Tony Blair ended his swansong appearance on the international stage on a high note on Saturday, helping clinch a deal for a new European Union treaty and trumpeting that Europe was turning Britain’s way. And tributes flowed from his fellow EU leaders after a marathon summit in Brussels, which he said allowed the reforming bloc to ”move on” after two years of institutional inertia.
European Union leaders clinched agreement on Saturday on a mandate to overhaul the 27-nation bloc after persuading Poland to end a stand-off that nearly torpedoed a marathon summit. The leaders agreed to negotiate a reform treaty by the end of this year, to be ratified by mid-2009.
The CIA is to declassify records detailing operations including illegal domestic surveillance, assassination plots and kidnapping, undertaken from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The records were compiled in 1973 at the behest of the then CIA director, James Schlesinger, and collected in a dossier known as the ”family jewels”.
Growing embarrassment at senior levels within the Bush administration over the Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba is driving an intensifying internal debate on how and when the camp can be closed. The Guantánamo camp has been used to hold hundreds of foreign terrorist suspects without charge or trial since the September 11 2001 attacks.
Meanwhile, elsewhere at the Cape Town Book Fair … Relative obscurity brought solitude, and solitude brought time; and with them came a chance to look around at the other stalls, and to wonder about the nature of book fairs and book signings, and to watch my autographing pen rust.
Three women have been released after being held hostage at a hair salon in Vanderbijlpark, Vaal Rand police said on Friday night. Captain William Mcera said three women had been released from Merle’s Hair Boutique on Attie Fourie road at about 5.45pm, but ”according to the negotiators there are still a few of them inside”.
European Union leaders reached broad agreement on Friday on a single post to run EU foreign affairs, the first success at a summit on the bloc’s future, but Poland help up progress towards a treaty to reform the union. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, hosting the summit, struggled to break Poland’s resistance.