A Congolese official says 70 people are believed dead after a riverboat capsized in the second reported deadly boat tipping this weekend.
Equateur Province spokeswoman Ebale Engumba said Sunday the boat hit a rock early Saturday in northwest Congo. She says 15 people survived among more than 100 estimated passengers.
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Since the financial crash of 2008, most bankers have sensibly stayed out of the limelight and attempted to avoid controversy. But not Thilo Sarrazin, a director of Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank. His inflammatory new book on the perils of immigration has sparked furious debate in his homeland and almost certainly cost him his $295,000-a-year job.
In “Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab” (which roughly translates as “Germany Does Away With Itself”) Sarrazin argues that the right kind of German women are having too few babies, while less-worthy citizens — Muslims and others with little education — are having far too many. The result, he claims, is that Germany is getting dumber and its economy being undermined. “With higher relative fertility among the less intelligent, the average intelligence of the population declines,” he writes.
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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton formally opened the first direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in nearly two years on Thursday, imploring the parties to ignore the long history of failed negotiations and make needed compromises to forge an agreement.
At a ceremony in the State Department’s ornate Benjamin Franklin room, Clinton said the Obama administration was committed to forging a settlement in a year’s time. But, she stressed that the heavy lifting must be done by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
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Severe drought in Russia has sent world food prices 5 percent higher in recent months, according to a new report by the United Nations, and though they remain well below the record levels reached during the 2007-08 world food crisis, the higher prices have already fueled deadly riots in Mozambique.
Today police in the capital, Maputo, opened fire on a mob of several thousand people — some of them throwing stones — in what officials said was an unsanctioned protest over the rise in food and commodity prices. The Associated Press reported that at least seven people were killed, including at least two children. The cost of bread in the southeastern African country has risen 25 percent in the past year, the AP reported, amid other commodity price increases.
A Palestinian gunman opened fire on an Israeli vehicle traveling in the West Bank on Tuesday, killing four passengers, authorities said, in a deadly attack that cast a long shadow over Mideast peace talks set to start this week.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But in the past, militant groups have staged attacks in an effort to sabotage peace efforts.
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Health experts in South Africa say many HIV-positive people in the country could get very sick and even die as a result of the strike by 1.3 million public service workers, including state nurses and pharmacists. The workers are demanding higher wages and improved benefits.
The protest action has shut down government clinics and hospitals, which usually dispense life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to more than a million HIV-infected South Africans.