Staff Reporter

The opening of a trapdoor and the sudden snap of a hangman’s noose at dawn on Saturday brought an extraordinary end to a political era in Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s execution, however, brought no early end to the country’s spiral of violence. Within hours, a series of car bombs killed dozens of people in Baghdad and south of the capital.

The former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has on Saturday been executed by hanging, at an unspecified location in Baghdad. United States-backed Iraqi television station al-Hurra and Saudi-owned satellite channel al-Arabiya said that the former Iraqi president was executed at 6am local time, following his conviction by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity

Saddam Hussein could be hanged within days after the rejection of his appeal by Iraq’s highest court on Tuesday. The former Iraqi dictator was sentenced to death in November over the killing of 148 Shi’ite Muslims from the town of Dujail in 1982. He is facing another trial, accused of genocide against the Kurds — but that may now never be completed.

Once hunted almost to extinction for their beautiful pelts, the fur seal has staged one of the animal kingdom’s greatest comebacks. However, their occupation of the beaches dotted around the British colony of South Georgia, the southern Antarctic island where almost all of the world’s fur seals gather to breed, has not pleased everyone.

A remote Spanish farming village with 25 inhabitants was on Friday several million euros richer after everybody in the village won a share of the top prize in the world’s biggest lottery, El Gordo. The church bells rang in Rebollo de Duero, in the central province of Soria, on Friday as the handful of farming families celebrated their good fortune.

Zuhair Abu Latifa’s toy shop is the first in a row of shops inside the Qalandia refugee camp, not far from the tall concrete wall that cuts off the occupied West Bank from Jerusalem. It is a single street in a tightly connected community, but it cuts across the entire spectrum of Palestinian politics.

Festive-season travellers are paranoid about losing their luggage and many take insurance to cover this. But few of them realise how expensive it could be if one gets ill when travelling abroad. Medical cover can cost you as little as R230 for a two-week holiday, which will pay out up to R7,5-million in medical costs.

Even by their own impressive standards as straight-talking controversialists, Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell must have surprised themselves by the intensity of the vitriol they flung at each other this week. She called him a bankrupt snake-oil salesman. He called her a fat-assed slob and threatened to sue.

HIV/Aids is probably the greatest challenge facing our schools and the country at large. We are a Catholic institution, and we are aware that the pandemic is among us and there is no denying it. So, as a community, we have the responsibility to educate and inform the school community about the disease, writes Pearl Matlou.

A woman passed her one-month-old grandson through the X-ray machine at Los Angeles international airport, it was revealed on Wednesday. A security worker saw the baby entering the machine sitting on a plastic bin intended for hand luggage and jackets. The official hurriedly pulled the bin out along the conveyor belt.

There’s horror in the air. Read it in the words of Mathatha Tsedu, the <i>City Press</i> editor, when he writes of pain so fierce it is like an arrow piercing his soul as he mourns his son. Thirty-one-year-old Avhatakali Netshisaulu was forced off a Johannesburg road two weeks ago and murdered. His body was stuffed into the boot of his car. The car was torched and his body charred.

Prosecutors at Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial on Wednesday produced government memos that they said link the ousted dictator personally to lethal gas attacks on Kurds. Chief prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon submitted a series of official documents, which he said showed Saddam and his six co-defendants involved in planning chemical attacks.