Foreign

Israel agrees to release 100 militants
ANCIENT WAYS: A Palestinian sheep herder walks with his sheep after leading them from his home near the Palestinian town of Beit Sahur, seen in the background, to an ancient well next to the construction site of a new security fence dividing Jeru...

Mutiny in Manila ends peacefully
ON STANDBY: Philippine government soldiers await orders to deploy in the financial district of Makati, south-east of Manila, where mutinous soldiers stormed the commercial centre before dawn yesterday. An undetermined number of disgruntled soldie...

Marriage death-knell for genius
PARIS - Creative genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compi...

White men can't jump?
South African Jacques Freitag sports the national flag after winning the international high jump meeting in Eberstadt, southern Germany, yesterday. Freitag won the competition with a jump of 2,3m. (AP) Eastern Cape&n...

Kenya crash 'not al-Qaeda's doing'
NAIROBI - A Kenyan investigator yesterday denied a claim attributed to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror network that the group was responsible for a plane crash on Mount Kenya hat left 12 Americans and two South Africans dead. "Those claims are fa...

US won't go in before ceasefire in Liberia
WASHINGTON - United States Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz reiterated yesterday that the US expeditionary force being assembled off Liberia would not go into the country until there was a ceasefire and embattled Liberian President Charles T...

Mugabe retains cricket post
HARARE - President Robert Mugabe was re-elected official patron of his national cricket union here on Saturday for an eighth consecutive year. Despite being unopposed at a crowded Zimbabwe Cricket Union (ZCU), there were dissenters at the meeting. ...

12 held over racial clash in Britain
LONDON - Twelve men, including eight believed to be of Iraqi origin, were arrested after a racial clash sparked by the apparently deliberate running over of an Iraqi asylum seeker, British police said. Police in Hull arrested the men,seconds after ...

Ruling on Tsvangirai application postponed
HARARE - A ruling on an application by Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to have treason charges against him dropped will not be handed down today, a lawyer said on Saturday. The Harare High Court was due to make a ruling today following...

'Give bodies to Saddam family'
BAGHDAD - Iraq's transitional Governing Council has called for the bodies of Saddam Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, to be given to their family, council member Samir Shaker Mahmud al-Sudayii said yesterday. Interviewed at a meeting of Baghdad's...

Sao Tome deal: mediators happy
BRAZZAVILLE - The international mediators who thrashed out a settlement to the short-lived military coup in Sao Tome and Principe are satisfied with the return to constitutional order on the impoverished west African archipelago, Congo's foreign mi...

Voodoo pilgrimage draws crowds
PLAINE DU NORD, Haiti - Carrying candles and a heavy spiritual debt, Josephine Derulien walked for 17 hours to reach this small farming town, swollen by thousands of others wrapping up a four-day pilgrimage. The pilgrimage, one of the most importan...

WORLD WATCH
Oz woman survives 4m fall SYDNEY - An Australian woman survived a 4-metre fall at a shopping mall here yesterday. The woman walked away uninjured after plunging between the fifth and second floors at Australia's biggest shopping centre. Paramedics ...

Banknote crisis in Zimbabwe
HARARE - Queues of angry people continued to crowd the pavements around banks here for a fourth day on Saturday as the troubled country's latest shortage - banknotes - pushed Zimbabweans' frustrations to new levels. Two flustered security guards w...

BMW stops making C-1 bike
MUNICH - BMW announced yesterday it had ceased production of the critically acclaimed, but low-sales volume, C-1 motorbike line. Noted for its integrated shell-roof-windscreen, the C-1 was aimed at an urban market which failed to materialise. "Ther...

Hopeful signs of recovery
WASHINGTON - Is the world's largest economy set to break out of its torpor of the past two-and-a-half years, or is it another false start leading to disappointment? Recent data in the US over the past week showed signs of surprising strength in ma...

Roundabout
PRAGUE - Mick Jagger fans got some satisfaction after all when the rock legend made a fleeting appearance on the streets of Prague in Prague during his 60th birthday celebration. The Saturday night-Sunday morning party in the Czech Republic capital...