The head of the Tintin studio announced on Thursday that Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks company has committed to produce at least one movie on the famed Belgian cartoon character. Hergé Studios head Nick Rodwell said the Hollywood company will go into pre-production of a Tintin movie.
The Bloemfontein High Court on Thursday postponed an urgent court interdict sought by four African National Congress (ANC) members to suspend the election of new office bearers at a northern Free State ANC regional conference. The matter was suspended to March 29 for consideration by the court.
An elderly man who shot dead his teenage lover after receiving a suspended sentence for assaulting her was on Thursday jailed for an effective 15 years. Moegamat Saiat Patrick (66) was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment on charges of murder, statutory rape and the illegal possession of a gun and ammunition.
The decision to recall Roberton’s Peri-Peri Spice from supermarket shelves has been withdrawn, the Department of Health said on Thursday. This was after the department’s forensic chemical laboratories in Cape Town and Pretoria determined that samples of the spice contained no traces of Sudan Red dye, department spokesperson Sibani Mngadi said.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has testified he launched last year’s war against Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon in line with a contingency plan he approved four months before, the Haaretz daily said on Thursday. Olmert told a judicial inquiry last month that Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 triggered the plans for a large-scale attack, the Israeli newspaper said.
Miners at the Sonop diamond mine in the Northern Cape will picket outside company headquarters in Wolmaransstad, North West, on Friday, the National Union of Mineworkers said. The union claims some workers have not been paid since January 24, and that retrenched workers have not been fully paid.
There will be no overspending on the R8,4-billion budgeted for the 2010 Soccer World Cup, Deputy Sport Minister Gert Oosthuizen said on Thursday. ”We’ll be in on R8,4-billion,” he said at a media briefing following a two-day workshop on the 2010 World Cup African Legacy programmes.
The levels of physical and sexual abuse experienced by South African women and children are unacceptably high and unfortunately still growing, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said on Thursday. She was speaking at the Union Buildings in Pretoria at the launch of the 365 Days national action plan to fight and eradicate gender-based violence.
Hundreds of people have rushed to a village in eastern India to see a male calf defy its herbivore nature by eating live chicks. Poultry farmer Ajit Ghosh said he discovered the calf’s strange behaviour after dozens of his newborn chickens went missing from his combined cow shed and chicken coop.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) on Thursday accused the government of stubbornly refusing to admit that the affirmative action policy is at the core of South Africa’s skills crisis, and proposed ways to address the crisis. DA spokesperson Mark Lowe emphasised, however, that the DA is not opposed to affirmative action to redress the imbalances of the past.