They had great expectations, but Africans mainly are disappointed by the crumbs that fell from the table of the Group of Eight (G8) powerful nations this week. The G8 leaders’ announcement of an aid package to Africa — including a doubling of aid to -billion — is not seen as enough to alleviate the continent’s grinding poverty.
A new push is being made to deliver television over an internet platform, with the potential to transform the medium into a new technology that offers more competition and programme choices. The ”convergence” of television and the internet is being pushed, interestingly, by major regional United States phone companies.
Sixteen people were killed and 39 wounded when a suicide bomber wearing a belt of explosives blew himself up early on Sunday outside an army recruitment centre in Baghdad, hospital and security sources said. Also on Sunday, a suicide car bomb exploded in Kirkuk, killing at least two civilians and wounding 16 more, police said.
Police have lifted a cordon around Birmingham city centre after about 20Â 000 people were evacuated overnight amid bomb fears in Britain’s second city, though a top officer virtually ruled out links to London’s terror attacks. Bomb-squad officers carried out four controlled explosions on a bus.
First he tackled the Holocaust, courting controversy but then silencing many of his critics with a masterpiece of cinema in the form of Schindler’s List. Now director Steven Spielberg is taking on another Jewish issue, with a film on the aftermath of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
A Pakistani man and some of his relatives chopped off his wife’s feet after accusing her of being promiscuous, police said on Saturday. The woman survived the gruesome attack, the latest in a wave of assaults that has raised international concern about the plight of women in rural Pakistan.
Sometimes words are superfluous. An image is enough — like the one displayed on giant posters on auditorium walls throughout the Johnson Space Centre, near Houston. They spell out Nasa’s aims in stark and unequivocal terms. A shuttle takes off in a plume of flame and smoke, heading to a red planet, its surface riven with canyons.
The United States’s Gulf Coast was braced for disaster on Saturday night as a killer hurricane headed for the US after wreaking havoc in the Caribbean. Hurricane Dennis has killed at least 32 people in Haiti and Cuba and is expected to make landfall anywhere from Louisiana to the Florida panhandle by Sunday afternoon.
The interrogator pushed his snarling face forward. He was only inches from the cowering man in front of him. "Tell us the truth," he hissed. "Why did you go to England?" Only days before, Zuka Kalinga had been safe in a British detention centre, awaiting his forced return to Zimbabwe.
British police evacuated 20 000 people from the centre of Britain’s second-biggest city, Birmingham, and carried out a controlled explosion on a bus on Saturday evening after receiving intelligence on an unspecified threat. Police say the incident was probably not connected to the London bomb attacks.