BBC News with Jonathan Izard
Nelson Mandela has returned to his Johannesburg residence after being discharged from hospital where he’d been treated for pneumonia for the past ten days. Milton Nkosi has more.
We know that he’s been treated for a lung infection which has a history dating back to his prison years when he was on Robben Island and that may have resulted in him getting TB which he was treated for in Capetown in the late 80s and that is where the history of this lung infection comes from. And now South Africans across the racial divide are having a self relief given that he is now back at home and the message from the President’s office is that he is improving and he’s had a sustained improvement in his hospital condition.
South Sudan has started to pump oil again ending a bitter 15-month row with Sudan that’s cost both countries billions of dollars in lost revenues. Oil production was halted early last year after landlocked South Sudan accused its neighbour of hiking transit fees to pipe the oil to international markets via Port Sudan. Emi Suhardi Mohd Fadzil is president of one of the companies operating in the South. He says the decision will benefit South Sudan.
“We keep saying when the oil flew then the nation glow, so yeah, I think South Sudan’s economy is going to revive. And always these are oil resumption. The economy of South Sudan practically depends on oil so now the oil has flown, so it should be better for the nation.”
The federal prosecutor’s office in Brazil has ordered police to investigate allegations of corruption against the former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. A businessman at the center of a long-running corruption scandal told prosecutors that the former president received money from illegal scheme that used public funds to pay coalition partners’ parties for political support. Mr. Lula has strongly denied any knowledge of the scheme. Several senior members of his Workers’ Party have been given long prison sentences for their involvement.
Five Americans and an Afghan doctor have been killed in a car bomb by a hospital in Zabul province in southern Afghanistan. Caroline Wyatt has the details.
The suicide bomber blew up his car full of explosives between a convoy carrying the Afghan governor of Zabul province and his officials and a US military convoy which were passing one another by chance. The governor believes that his vehicle was intended target although three American soldiers and two US civilians were killed in the attack while the governor survived. The killings came on the same day that US general Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff arrived in Afghanistan for a visit to see the level of training American troops will give to Afghan forces after Nato’s combat mission finishes by the end of 2014.
The latest talks on Iran’s nuclear program have concluded without agreement after a two-day meeting in Kazakhstan between Iran and six world powers. The EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said both sides’ positions remained far apart.
World News from the BBC
The Portuguese government says it does not agree with Friday’s ruling by the country’s highest court that some cuts in public sector pay proposed in its austerity budget are unconstitutional. However, it’s said it would respect the court’s decision. Allison Roberts reports
After an extraordinary cabinet meeting on Saturday, Portugal’s government said Friday’s court ruling created serious difficulties from meeting budget targets agreed with international lenders. The ruling struck down more than a billion Euros in spending cuts as unfair to public sector workers and pensioners. The government said it respected the judges but they’d failed to take into accounts steps taken by the government to make its austerity measures fair to all citizens.
Following an emergency meeting of the cabinet, the Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho met the President Anibal Cavaco Silva to discuss the next steps forward.
Gunmen in central Mozambique have killed at least two people during an attack on a bus and a truck near the town of Muxungue. The ambush came two days after militiamen loyal to the opposition party Renamo killed four policemen in Muxungue in an attempt to free several people who had been arrested. A Renamo spokesman denied his group was involved in the attack on the two vehicles.
The rebel leader who seized power in the Central African Republic two weeks ago, Michel Djotodia, has created the new body to select an interim president. In a decree, Mr. Djotodia who says he himself will remain eligible for selection said the interim president would run the country until elections are held within 18 months.
Correspondents say Mr. Djotodia had originally planned to appoint himself president of the Central African Republic for three years.
Nepal’s women’s commission has condemned an attack on an elderly woman in the remote west of the country after she was accused of being a witch. The 60-year-old woman was stripped naked, her head shaved and was fed excrement as well as been badly beaten. The assault was apparently sanctioned by the village council after a local woman said she had used witchcraft to cause death.