KMS
South Africa’s Jacob Zuma mounts last-ditch legal fight against jail term
South Africa’s ex-president Jacob Zuma on Friday mounted a last-ditch legal bid to avoid prison after the country’s top court ordered him jailed for failing to appear before graft investigators. In a landmark ruling, the Constitutional Court on Tuesday handed Zuma a 15-month term for contempt after he snubbed a probe into the theft of state assets under his tenure. If the 79-year-old fails to turn himself in by Sunday, police will be given a further three days to arrest him and take him to jail to start the sentence. As the deadline loomed, Zuma pleaded on Friday that the order be “reconsidered and rescinded.” “It will not be futile,” Zuma said in papers filed to the court, “to make one last attempt to invite the Constitutional Court to relook its decision and to merely reassess whether it...
Eleven dead, 98 injured after train derails in Egypt
Eleven people were killed and 98 injured on Sunday in a train accident in Egypt’s Qalioubia province north of Cairo, the health ministry said in a statement. The train was heading from Cairo to the Nile Delta city of Mansoura when four carriages derailed at 1:54 p.m. (1154 GMT), about 40 kms (25 miles) north of Cairo, Egyptian National Railways said in a short statement. The cause of the accident is being investigated, it added. More than 50 ambulances took the injured to three hospitals in the province, the health ministry said. The derailing is the latest of several recent railway crashes in Egypt. At least 20 people were killed and nearly 200 were injured in March when two trains collided near Tahta, about 440 kms (275 miles) south of Cairo. Fifteen people were injured this month when t...
