It is going to come as a shock to tens of millions of lungs, but the Chinese government is planning a tobacco-free Olympics when the world’s heaviest smoking nation hosts the event in 2008. Long used to breathing some of the most polluted air in the world, Beijingers will get some respite during the games as a result of measures revealed recently.
Zimbabwean authorities are considering grounds for extraditing suspected mercenary Simon Mann to Equatorial Guinea as they want him to stand trial for masterminding a botched coup. Equatorial Guinea Attorney General José Olo Obon forwarded a 200-page dossier to the Zimbabwean attorney general last week.
Sweat is running down Patricia Clark’s face as she shouts at a crowd of hundreds of Liberians through a megaphone. ”The law says, if you jump on a woman without her consent, that is rape. You will go to prison for 10 years. If you rape a child, you will get life. You die in prison; they bury you; they will chain you in your grave.”
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Down a dusty ally, past noisy chicken coops and roving bands of small children, about 50 Ivorian football supporters gaze intently at a tiny TV screen suspended from the rafters of the green canvas awning at the X-Five bar. Côte d’Ivoire has qualified for the World Cup finals for the first time this year.
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President Thabo Mbeki on Friday denied suggestions of a ”supposed life and death conflict” between himself and former deputy president Jacob Zuma. Reality would also prove speculation that the African National Congress was in danger of falling apart was nothing more than ”an expression of the vain wishes of its inventors”, he said in his weekly newsletter on the ANC website.
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The Independent Democrats have failed in their bid to topple the Democratic Alliance-led coalition in the Cape Town unicity, South African Broadcasting Corporation news reported on Thursday. The ID, with the backing of the African National Congress, moved to scrap the mayoral executive-committee system.
The South African Police Service (SAPS) restructuring process will not result in job losses or massive displacement of personnel, says Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula. He said ”a flatter organisational structure” for the police is needed, rather than the current many layers of command and control.
The South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) has postponed its secondary strike planned for Friday — in sympathy with striking security guards — amid a number of applications opposing it. The Johannesburg Labour Court earlier barred the union from organising secondary strikes at Transnet and in the tollgate industry.
Fresh fighting erupted on Thursday between Islamic militia and a United States-backed warlord alliance on the outskirts of the lawless Somali capital, Mogadishu, killing at least three. Stung by the loss on Wednesday of a key position in north-east Mogadishu, the alliance attacked the Islamists at the nearby village of El Arfid.