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/ 13 October 2006
Britain’s top army commander said British troops in Iraq should be withdrawn soon because their presence was exacerbating security problems in the country, according to a British newspaper. General Richard Dannatt also told the Daily Mail in an interview published on Friday that Britain’s Iraq venture was aggravating the security threat elsewhere in the world.
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/ 13 October 2006
Pop diva Madonna left Malawi on Friday after receiving official permission to adopt a one-year-old boy from the impoverished Southern African country. Her departure brought to a climax a controversial week-long charity visit during which her aides denied earlier reports by government officials that she planned to adopt a child.
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/ 13 October 2006
A cheap and widely available malaria drug is an effective treatment for pregnant women. Although amodiaquine is an older malaria treatment, little was known about how safe it is in pregnant women. But researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found it eliminated the malaria parasite without causing any serious side effects.
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/ 13 October 2006
Walt Disney on Thursday said it took ”appropriate action” against employees at its Paris theme park who were caught simulating sex while dressed as Disney characters in a digital video that has received wide attention on the internet. Disney would not say whether it had dismissed any of the costumed employees featured in the grainy video, which appears to have been shot with a hidden camera.
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/ 13 October 2006
In a bid to avert a growing crisis in the supply of schoolteachers, the government is to introduce bursaries for students training to enter the profession. About 20 000 of the country’s 350 000 public school teachers leave the system every year, but universities annually produce only 6 000 new teachers.
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/ 13 October 2006
Little Foot, the first complete fossil Australopithecus skeleton, found at Sterkfontein nine years ago, has raised questions about whether the cave complex near Krugersdorp really is the ”Cradle of Humankind”. Ron Clarke, celebrated palaeo-anthropologist and Little Foot’s ”caretaker”, insisted that Africa, not South Africa, had to be seen as the cradle.
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/ 13 October 2006
The department of environmental affairs and tourism has slammed the decision by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to suspend the sale of 60 tons of stockpiled ivory held by South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, arguing that it would not trigger an increase in poaching.
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/ 13 October 2006
The growing number of brutal attacks on the Somali community in the Western Cape has forced the local police to admit that xenophobia, and not criminality, is the main motivating factor in the attacks. In the most recent incidents, two Somali businessmen with shops in Delft and Kuilsriver were killed, while one Somali trader was shot and injured in Khayelitsha.
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/ 13 October 2006
While same-sex partners will soon be able to marry legally, it seems increasingly likely that heterosexual couples will be able to choose from two marriage Acts to formalise their unions. The Civil Unions Bill, although purporting to be equal in status and legal rights to the Marriage Act, creates a separate regime for same-sex couples.
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/ 13 October 2006
Over the telephone Zenzele Sishi, vice-Âpresident of the South African Unintegrated Forces, sounds like a cross between Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz and a child soldier on amphetamines. His speech is erratic and he seems delusional at times, his story constantly changing. Sishi claims he is leading 3 000 paramilitaries, most of whom are former members of the Self Protection into training in the bush near the Swaziland and Mozambique borders.