SOUTH AFRICA
Union boss accused of rape
An employee has accused the leader of powerful trade union federation COSTATU of rape, but the politician shot down the allegation as a plot on Saturday. COSTATU general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said the sex was consensual and that his accuser tried to blackmail him into paying 2 million rand (US$204,000). The 26-year-old woman told the Weekend Post that Vavi overpowered her on Jan. 25 in her office at the union’s Johannesburg headquarters. “He put me on the floor and forced himself on me. The general secretary raped me,” she said in an internal complaint, according to the paper. Vavi slammed the complaint as a plot to topple him. “I vehemently deny the allegations made against me by the staff member concerned,” he said in a statement on Saturday. “I have engaged lawyers, and I am ready and willing to appear before any legitimate body to clear my name.”
BULGARIA
Poll highlights discontent
Almost three-quarters of the population consider their country “intolerable,” according to a new survey released on Saturday by the Open Society Institute, following weeks of protest against the government and a worsening economy. The survey of 1,155 people by the public policy charity found that 72 percent thought the political situation was “intolerable,” with 22 percent judging it was just “bearable.” Only 2 percent of those surveyed described the current state of the nation as normal. The 72 percent of respondents denouncing the nation’s political quagmire is at a six-year high, and up 15 percentage points from July last year. The survey also found that almost 40 percent of the population wanted the immediate resignation of the government of Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski, whose minority Cabinet took office in late May.
IRAN
Man self-immolates: report
A semi-official news agency is reporting that a member of a small religious minority set himself on fire next to the country’s parliament building. ISNA’s late Saturday report says the man, a member of the Ahl Al-Haq, suddenly poured a bottle of fuel on his body and lit it. It said he was taken to hospital. Opposition Web sites have reported two other such self-immolations since last month by Ahl Al-Haq adherents, following the alleged abuse of a group member in prison. Tehran recognizes some non-Muslim minorities such as Zoroastrians, but others like the Baha’i complain of exclusion from state jobs, vilification in the media and other pressures. The Ahl Al-Haq faith is found mostly among ethnic Kurds in both western Iran and Iraq.
MALI
Voters head to polls
Voters were heading to the polls yesterday in the nation’s first election since last year’s coup, despite massive technical glitches which have resulted in tens of thousands of registered voters being dropped from the voter list. In the contested region of Kidal yesterday, only a trickle of voters made their way past checkpoints manned by UN peacekeepers. The majority that came could not find their name on the lists posted outside their polling station. Kidal was the birthplace of last year’s uprising by Tuareg separatists, a rebellion which set in motion a sequence of events that led to the coup in the capital. Officials are worried that low voter turnout, combined with the technical lapses that are preventing people from voting will undermine the legitimacy of the election.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema