It looked like yet another jubilant Barack Obama rally. The cavernous Indiana University sports hall in Bloomington jammed with thousands of supporters who stood in their seats and cheered deafeningly loudly. Ever since Obama launched his bid to become America’s first ever black President 15 months ago, hundreds of cities and towns have seen the same huge rallies.
President Thabo Mbeki’s government has approved the disbanding of the elite Scorpions crime-fighting unit, bowing to pressure from supporters of rival Jacob Zuma who accused it of political abuse. Mbeki’s Cabinet adopted two Bills last week paving the way for the end of the Directorate of Special Operations.
China and India and are moving toward becoming the biggest economies in the world: with 2,4-billion people, or 40% of the world’s population and annual GDP growth rates of between 8% and 10%, experts say that they could one day overtake the United States.
The establishment of a media tribunal in South Africa should not be viewed as interfering with press freedom, the African National Congress (ANC) on Saturday. Spokesperson Jessie Duarte said the ANC was only making a proposal and that it was open to public debate.
The Ginwala commission set up to inquire into the suspension of National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) head Vusi Pikoli said on Saturday it was aware that Pikoli is allegedly being blackmailed by a hacker. Commission spokesperson Lawson Naidoo said the commission had been notified by Pikoli’s lawyers.
South African athletes continued to dominate the 16th African Athletics Championships on another windy day in Addis Ababa on Saturday. Three more gold medals by Chris Harmse, Hennie Kotze and Sunette Viljoen, in the hammer throw, 110m hurdles and javelin respectively, brought the team’s golden haul to nine.
Three decades have passed since the movie Jaws sent terrified bathers scrambling out of the ocean. But as any beach lifeguard knows, there’s still nothing like a gory shark attack to stoke public hysteria and paranoia. In the first four months of this year, there were four fatal shark attacks worldwide, compared with one in the whole of 2007.
After a day of top level meetings, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party on Saturday failed to make a decision on whether it will take part in presidential run-off elections scheduled for next month. Observers now fear that there is a fierce dispute within the Movement for Democratic Change over whether to boycott the second round of voting that was announced on Friday.
Syed Ali was playing on the roof of his mud-brick house when the killers came for Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai last week. Karzai survived the attack on Kabul’s broad parade ground. Ten-year-old Syed Ali, a kilometre away watching his mother cleaning almond shells to supplement the family’s winter fuel, died, with two others, when he was hit by a stray bullet.
Behind all the words, the turning over of facts, the analysis, the frantic speculation (did the wife know?) and the tormented search for meanings (how could this happen?), lies a central image: a woman and her three children buried alive, toothless, hunchbacked, pale-skinned, talking in their own mumbling language, just beneath the surface of everyday life for 24 years.