VIRGINIA: Two people were killed and another missing after a hot air balloon hit a power line and caught fire (pictured) over Virginia during a festival, police said yesterday. Authorities have not identified the victims and were conducting a search in the air and with more than 100 people on the ground for the third person who was in the balloon’s basket at the time of the Friday evening accident about 50km north of Richmond. “We still have not located the basket or the balloon. We do continue to keep finding debris and various items that would have been on the hot air balloon,” Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller told a televised news conference. She said there were eyewitness reports that two people were seen tumbling from the basket after the balloon caught fire, but said it was unclear if they fell or jumped. Witnesses posted photos online showing a balloon in mid-air with its basket engulfed in flames and a trail of smoke spilling into the sky.
Unrest in South Africa town after polls
JOHANNESBURG: South African police said yesterday they arrested around 60 rioters after violent protests in a Johannesburg township amid allegations of voter fraud in elections that returned Nelson Mandela’s ANC to power. Rivalry reminiscent of the twilight of apartheid had flared up between the African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) shortly after the polls on Wednesday. The IFP and EFF parties have made claims of vote-rigging in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township, where angry residents on Friday burned tyres and barricaded roads, and the army was deployed to help quell the unrest, police said.
Hungary’s Orban sworn in as premier
BUDAPEST: Fresh from a landslide election win in April, Hungary’s powerful premier Viktor Orban was formally sworn in as prime minister yesterday, and hailed his controversial reforms as revolutionary. “Since coming to power (in 2010), a revolution has happened in Hungary,” Orban told several thousand supporters at a celebration rally afterwards outside the parliament building in Budapest. “Not on streets or squares, or with swords, but in people’s hearts and minds, the post-communist period is now closed,” he said to cheers. On April 6 Orban’s right-wing Fidesz party won its second two-thirds majority in a row, granting it further legislative carte blanche to amend the constitution.
CAR’s ex-Seleka rebels name new leader
BANGUI: Central African Republic’s ex-Seleka fighters yesterday named Joseph Zoundeko as their new military leader in a bid to unite the mostly Muslim rebel group amid ongoing sectarian violence in the war-torn country. More than 100 ex-Seleka officers attended the two-day meeting in the northeastern town of Ndele including Nourreddine Adam, the right-hand man of former president Michel Djotodia, who seized power in March last year in a political coup that plunged Central Africa into chaos. Agencies
