The European Union is ready to help Iran build several light-water nuclear reactors and set up a nuclear fuel bank if Tehran stops enriching uranium, according to a copy of a draft proposal seen by Agence France-Presse on Friday. Russia would enrich uranium for Iran in a partnership.
The top United Nations humanitarian official warned on Friday that relief efforts in Darfur could collapse within weeks unless the government makes good on a peace deal and donors fund aid work in the troubled Sudanese region. Jan Egeland, the top humanitarian aid official, told the UN Security Council that the government must lift restrictions on aid groups if they are to do their job properly.
Police in Zimbabwe have arrested two South African immigration officials and their Zimbabwean counterpart as they tried to smuggle cigarettes and ivory across the border into South Africa, a media report said on Saturday. A police spokesperson said He said 412 cartons of cigarettes and five bags with more than 100 pieces of ivory ornaments concealed under blankets were discovered.
A sperm donor passed an extremely rare and dangerous genetic ailment to five children born to four couples, doctors reported on Friday in a case that exposes a gap in the screening process. The disease, severe congenital neutropenia, can be fatal in children if untreated but is so rare that sperm banks do not test for it.
The French were voted the world’s most unfriendly nation by a landslide in a British poll published on Saturday. They were also voted the most boring and most ungenerous. A decisive 46% of the 6 000 people surveyed by travellers’ website Where Are You Now said the French were the most unfriendly nation people on the planet, British newspapers reported.
Two foreigners appeared in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court on Friday in connection with drug offences, fraud and money laundering, police said. Thomas Scheffer and Shmuel Propheta, both 48, were arrested in March after a joint investigation by the Gauteng crime intelligence unit, the health department and Interpol.
Al Gore has had plenty of time to develop a self-deprecating sense of humour over the past six years, and it shows. ”My name is Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States,” the broad-shouldered 58-year-old tells audiences wherever he goes.
Traders on the world’s financial markets left for home on Friday night counting their losses after a week of extreme turbulence that witnessed the biggest one-day fall in share prices in London and New York for three years. Metals prices slid in further bumpy trading on Friday with copper, nickel and aluminium slipping up to 10%.
The last of 16-million tonnes of concrete will be poured in on Saturday, making Chairman Mao’s dream a reality, and giving China’s current generation of engineers-turned-leaders the chance to proclaim another colossal step forward in the country’s ”harmonious development”. But the completion of the Three Gorges dam has been anything but harmonious.
Six detainees have been injured at Guantánamo Bay in the most violent uprising since the prison began holding suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban supporters four years ago. The revolt was suppressed with ”non-lethal force”, including rubber bullets and pepper spray.