The International Monetary Fund, to which Zimbabwe owes -million in arrears, is to close its office at the end of the month after 11 years in Harare, a move the state-controlled press described as politically driven.
The British government said on Friday it was investigating a report on a Middle East television station that hostage Kenneth Bigley had been killed by his captors in Iraq.
”We are trying urgently to corroborate reports that Mr Bigley has been killed, but have not yet done so,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.
Libya and Liberia should pay reparations to Sierra Leone for backing rebels who waged one of the most savage wars in modern history, an independent truth and reconciliation commission said in a report on Friday. ”Libya … should make financial contributions to the War Victims Fund,” the commission said.
Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, has reported new polio cases just as the government intensified efforts to eradicate the deadly disease, officials said on Friday. The Nigerian cases coincided with the the biggest polio-eradication campaign ever launched in Africa, which was initiated simultaneously in 23 sub-Saharan countries on Friday, with the goal of immunising 80-million children under five over the next four days.
The Boeremag treason trial was delayed in the Pretoria High Court on Friday after an alleged altercation between suspected leader Tom Vorster and a fellow accused.
Vorster had to be rushed for medical treatment after he lost his balance and tumbled down stairs between the court cells and the courtroom following the alleged altercation on Friday morning.
A group calling itself ”Brigades of the Martyrs Abdullah al-Azzam” and claiming to be part of Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility on Friday for the bomb blasts targeting Israeli tourists in Egypt, in a statement posted on an Islamist website. Meanwhile, in the devastated wing of Egypt’s Taba Hilton hotel, tourists struggled to free the bodies of two people skewered on tangled metal.
Twelve people were killed and the bride at a wedding party was among the wounded when US warplanes bombed the rebel-held Iraqi city of Fallujah early on Friday, doctors said. The US military said it was a ”precision strike” targeting leaders of Iraq’s most wanted man, the Al-Qaeda-linked militant Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
President George W Bush and Senator John Kerry meet on Friday in a debate rematch as a new poll shows a shift toward the Democratic challenger. This time, Bush will be on the defensive going in, after a widely panned performance in last week’s debate, falling poll numbers, bad news out of Iraq and Friday’s release of the September jobs report.
Harry Potter author JK Rowling said on Friday that one of her characters will not survive the next book in her series about the young wizard — but refused to say who would die. Asked on her official web site whether she planned to kill off any more characters, Rowling replied, ”Yes, sorry.”
The JSE Securities Exchange South Africa moved further into uncharted territory on Friday as money continued to follow into local equities. A turnaround in European markets added to the positivity. By 11.55am, the all share and all share industrial indices were up 0.74% and 0.86% respectively. Resources rose 1.05%, the platinum mining index jumped 1.83% and the gold mining index gained 0.48%.