JOHANNESBURG - A SOUTH African court on Friday sentenced a white youth to 169 years for shooting and killing four black people including a baby and a 10-year-old boy in a northwestern farming town, a report said.

Swartruggens Johan Nel, 18, randomly opened fire on people in the Skierlik black informal settlement near his family farm in January, killing four and injuring 11.

WASHINGTON - US TELEPHONE operator Verizon Wireless has acknowledged that some of its employees accessed President-elect Barack Obama's cell phone records without authorisation.

'This week we learned that a number of Verizon Wireless employees have, without authorisation, accessed and viewed President-elect Barack Obama's personal cell phone account,' the company said in a statement released late on Thursday.

BAGHDAD - FOLLOWERS of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr marched on Friday against a pact letting US forces stay in Iraq until 2011, toppling an effigy of President George W. Bush where US troops once tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein.

Thousands of demonstrators chanted and waved Iraqi flags in Baghdad's Firdos square, where US forces pulled down a statue of the ousted Iraqi dictator when they took the city in 2003.