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/ 7 February 2008
United Nations goodwill ambassador and Hollywood megastar Angelina Jolie visited Iraq on a humanitarian mission on Thursday and met top officials to demand help for people displaced by the war. "There are over two million displaced people and there never seems to be a real coherent plan to help them," she said.
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/ 6 February 2008
Dozens of tornadoes ripped across southern American states, causing severe damage and killing at least 45 people, officials and United States media said on Wednesday. More than 50 tornadoes touched down as a series of thunderstorms rare for the winter season rolled through the region late on Tuesday and early on Wednesday.
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/ 6 February 2008
Tornadoes and thunderstorms ravaged several states in the American South overnight, killing at least 26 people, injuring dozens and causing widespread damage, emergency services and local media said. CNN reports put the death toll at 27. The violent storms swept across Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi.
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/ 5 February 2008
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugged out a neck-and-neck Democratic feud and John McCain sought a chokehold on the Republican race on Super Tuesday, a coast-to-coast White House nominating clash unique in United States history. Super Tuesday embraces millions of voters from across racial, religious, social and income barriers.
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/ 5 February 2008
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama spent the final, tension-filled hours before Tuesday’s Super Tuesday primaries squeezing out votes in the East Coast battlefield states where opinion polls place the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination almost neck and neck.
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/ 22 January 2008
Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama engaged in a bitter crossfire on Monday as their United States presidential campaign took an ugly personal turn on the Martin Luther King holiday. Obama’s complaints about former President Bill Clinton’s attacks on him on behalf of his wife’s campaign boiled over at a rancorous debate.
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/ 12 January 2008
Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton on Friday proposed -billion in emergency spending to stave off a possible United States election-year recession, upstaging Republican rivals who clashed over the economy but offered few specifics.
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/ 11 January 2008
It was the defining moment of the New Hampshire race: Hillary Clinton, the icy control queen of the Democratic party welling up with emotion — and it may have won her an improbable victory over Barack Obama. The emotional moment in a café on the eve of Tuesday’s poll was widely credited on Thursday for bringing female voters back to the Clinton fold.
Iranian speedboats swarmed three United States navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, radioing a threat to blow them up and prompting a stiff US warning ahead of President George Bush’s trip to the Middle East, Pentagon officials said on Monday.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton battled to keep crucial New Hampshire from swinging to rising rival Barack Obama on Sunday but new polls showed him jumping into the lead. In the hotly contested Republican race, Arizona Senator John McCain leaped ahead of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney even as Romney tried to raise doubts about McCain.
Hillary Clinton launched a searing attack on surging rival Barack Obama, as polls showed he could inflict a second body blow to her White House hopes in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. Clinton used a tense face-to-face debate, three days before the next crucial 2008 test, to argue her rival was inconsistent and inexperienced.
White House foes chased last undecided voters ahead of Thursday’s dead-heat first nominating clashes in Iowa, as comeback Republican John McCain grabbed a new poll lead in the next key state, New Hampshire.
Pakistan parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8 will be held in February, a senior election commission said on Tuesday. ”Elections will not be delayed beyond February. We expect it to be towards the later part of next month,” the official said. The commission was to make a public announcement later in the day.
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/ 14 December 2007
In an act that has sparked outrage among Egyptian women’s rights activists, a controversial Islamic scholar filed a lawsuit against the minister of health protesting against a recent ban on female circumcision, a practice referred to by rights groups as female genital mutilation.
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/ 8 December 2007
The intelligence came from an exotic variety of sources: there was the so-called Laptop of Death; there was the Iranian commander who mysteriously disappeared in Turkey. But pivotal to the United States investigation into Iran’s suspect nuclear-weapons programme was the work of a little-known intelligence specialist, Thomas Fingar.
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/ 7 December 2007
The teenage gunman who shot dead eight people at a Nebraska shopping mall before turning the gun on himself had lost his job at McDonald’s hours earlier after being accused of stealing from the till. Robert Hawkins (19) emerged on Thursday as a high school dropout who had spent four years in foster care.
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/ 5 December 2007
What does President Thabo Mbeki like to do in his spare time? Ballroom dancing? Playing the piano? No, the man likes to work during leisure hours, says his spokesperson. As the ruling party’s national conference in Polokwane approaches members of the South African Cabinet certainly need ways to unwind.
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/ 29 November 2007
Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf was sworn in as president for a second term on Thursday, but this time as a civilian and without his army uniform to protect him from pressure to end emergency rule. Musharraf took the oath for another five years in office from the newly installed chief justice Abdul Hameed Dogar.
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/ 23 November 2007
More than 150 passengers and crew escaped unhurt after their cruise ship struck an iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean and started to sink, an Argentine coast-guard official and a spokesperson for the ship’s owner said on Friday. ”Everyone is safe and accounted for,” Susan Hayes, a spokesperson for ship owner Gap Adventures, told CNN.
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/ 15 November 2007
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is expected to appoint a caretaker government on Thursday to oversee elections he has promised for January but which the opposition say will be a sham under emergency rule. ”We don’t expect fair and free elections under General Musharraf and his mini martial law,” said Farhatullah Babar, an opposition spokesperson.
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/ 10 November 2007
Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto described Pakistan on Saturday as a pressure cooker about to explode, as President Pervez Musharraf’s government tightened screws on media by ordering out three British journalists. Having invoked emergency powers a week ago, Musharraf has sacked most of the country’s judges and ordered police to round up most of the opposition leadership.
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/ 6 November 2007
They challenge your newspaper literacy, interrupt otherwise intelligible conversations, and add to the difficulty of finding your way. The culprits: India’s endemic acronyms, abbreviations and initials. Bureaucrats across the world pack official reports with them, but India distinguishes itself by relishing in their everyday use.
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/ 23 October 2007
Thousands more people were ordered to evacuate their homes on Tuesday, bringing the number of people chased away by the wind-whipped flames that have engulfed southern California to at least 270 000. The dozen wildfires have burned more than 700 homes and set 99 537ha ablaze.
A police officer in a small town in northern Wisconsin on Sunday shot dead at least six young people, including a 14-year-old girl, at a house party before he was shot and killed by a police sniper. News reports from Crandon, a close-knit town of 2 000 people, suggested the suspected shooter and his victims were part of the same circle of friends.
President George Bush said on Friday that the United States does not use torture during interrogations, amid renewed debate about his administration’s methods in the war on terror. ”This government does not torture people. We stick to US law and our international obligations,” Bush said.
With a series of small beeps from a spiky globe 50 years ago, the world shrank and humanity’s view of Earth and the cosmos expanded. Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched by the Soviets and circled the globe on October 4 1957. The Space Age was born. And what followed were changes to everyday life that people now take for granted.
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/ 28 September 2007
During the eight days that Tanya Rider lay seriously injured in her crashed sport utility vehicle, her husband was fighting to get authorities to launch a search for her, he said on Friday. Rider (33) was found alive but dehydrated at the bottom of a steep ravine on Thursday, more than a week after she failed to return home from work.
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/ 25 September 2007
Hundreds of monks marched towards central Yangon on Tuesday in defiance of a threat by Burma’s ruling generals to send soldiers in to end the biggest anti-junta protests in 20 years. About 2 000 monks and ordinary people marched out of the Shwedagon Pagoda, the former Burma’s holiest shrine and the symbolic heart of a growing campaign against 45 years of unbroken military rule.
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/ 22 September 2007
Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani startled a United States gun-lobby audience on Friday when he interrupted his speech to take a phone call from his wife — and it didn’t seem to be an emergency. ”Hello, dear. I’m talking to the members of the NRA right now. Would you like to say hello?” he chirped.
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/ 16 September 2007
Las Vegas police arrested former football star OJ Simpson on Sunday in connection with a hotel room break-in, CNN said. A source with the Las Vegas Police Department told CNN Simpson was taken into custody at the Palms hotel. Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, in June 1994.
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/ 13 September 2007
President Robert Mugabe on Thursday fired a broadside at Western media for biased coverage of events in Zimbabwe, ignoring an adultery case involving his staunch opponent, former archbishop Pius Ncube. ”If one of my own ministers does mischief and takes another person’s wife, it will be carried on television and they will say this is what Mugabe’s ministers are doing,” Mugabe said.
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/ 12 September 2007
A powerful earthquake struck near Indonesia’s Sumatra island on Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey said, and the shock was felt across South-East Asia. A tsunami warning was issued by several Indian Ocean countries. Several buildings in Padang, the provincial capital of Indonesia’s West Sumatra, collapsed, Global TV reported.