The three-year jail term handed down on David Irving by a Viennese court for denying that the Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews at Auschwitz, and for declaring Adolf Hitler innocent of that crime, evidently left him stunned. It also stirred a backlash in the United Kingdom, where sections of the media and the intelligentsia persist in seeing Irving as a harmless eccentric.
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The Democratic Alliance said on Monday afternoon that it had been offered a deal that would give it control of the city of Cape Town. DA Western Cape leader Theuns Botha said the offer would give a grouping of 106 seats — enough for a clear majority in the 210-seat council.
Continental ministers of energy and water affairs were to co-operate at a conference on developing hydropower’s potential to provide affordable energy to Africans, Minerals and Energy Minister Lindiwe Hendricks said. The two-day conference is taking place in Johannesburg.
Mick McCarthy’s three-year reign at Sunderland came to an end on Monday when the former Ireland manager was sacked by the club, currently anchored to the bottom of the English Premiership. McCarthy (47) guided Sunderland back into the the top flight as Championship winners last season.
Japanese researchers have succeeded in making the sweet smell of vanilla come out of the last thing people could imagine — cow dung. In a world-first recycling project, a one-hour heating and pressuring process allows cow faeces to produce vanillin, the main component of the vanilla-bean extract.
Nearly 120 pro-Taliban militants have been killed during three days of clashes with Pakistani forces in a remote tribal town, the military said on Monday. ”According to latest information, the death toll in fighting last Saturday has gone up to 100,” military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan told Agence France-Presse.
Horrors such as the Rwandan genocide, in which 800Â 000 people were killed in 100 days, are an appalling indictment of man’s inhumanity and must be told, said British actor John Hurt. He was talking ahead of the release of his latest film, Shooting Dogs, which opens in France on Wednesday.
Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, is in fact an elephant, according to a Scottish palaeontologist. Neil Clark, curator of palaeontology at Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum, told The Times on Monday that the idea for Nessie was dreamt up as a ”magnificent piece of marketing” .
The impoverished West African nation of Benin was counting votes on Monday after the first round of its presidential election dragged on late into the night under the shadow of fraud claims. Polling, which had been due to end at 4pm on Sunday, was prolonged until past midnight in some areas because of logistical problems.