Tuesday April 24, 2012

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Brad Dubbelman

Making headlines:

The City of Johannesburg has welcomed allegations made against metro police officers in a Corruption Watch report. "Corruption is a multifaceted problem that impacts on many areas of society and this also impacts on the work we do," city spokesperson Gabu Tugwana said. He said many measures were already in place to prevent corruption. Yesterday, Corruption Watch executive director David Lewis released a report "The Law for Sale" on corruption within the Johannesburg metropolitan police department.

Crime generates an estimated $2.1-trillion in global annual proceeds – or 3.6% of the world's GDP – and the problem may be growing, a senior UN official said. "It makes the criminal business one of the largest economies in the world, one of the top 20 economies," said Yury Fedotov, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), describing it as a threat to security and economic development. The figure was calculated recently for the first time by the UNODC and World Bank, based on data for 2009, and no comparisons are yet available, Fedotov told a news conference.

Sudanese war planes bombed a market in the capital of South Sudan's oil-producing Unity State yesterday, residents and officials said, in an attack the southern army called a declaration of war. Sudan denied carrying out any air raids but its President Omar Hassan al-Bashir ramped up the political tension by ruling out a return to negotiations with the South, saying its government only understood "the language of the gun". Weeks of border fighting have brought the neighbours closer to a full-blown war than at any time since the South split away from Sudan as an independent country in July.

Also making headlines:

Fighting in Syria continues despite announcements from the Syrian government that it will comply with a UN-backed truce and that it has withdrawn troops and heavy weapons from cities and towns, the UN political affairs chief said.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.