A musical mystery surrounded Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, on Wednesday after a piano was discovered near its 1 347m summit. The piano was recovered at the weekend by 15 volunteers from the John Muir Trust, a conservation charity that owns the Scottish peak.
A New Zealander’s plan to sell his amputated leg has been tripped up by police and an internet auction website. Shane Torrance (42), whose tattooed right leg was amputated 15 months ago, wants to sell it to cover his debts and raise money for his daughter who has diabetes, <i>The Nelson Mail</i> reported on Thursday.
German politicians and football authorities reacted with anger on Thursday to a warning from a former government spokesperson that World Cup visitors from abroad risked race attacks in eastern Germany. ”There are small and mid-sized towns in Brandenburg and elsewhere where I would advise anyone with a different skin colour not to go,” Uwe-Karsten Heye said.
Evidence in a court case in which Botswana’s San Bushmen are fighting for rights to ancestral land in the Kalahari wound up in court this week, with a rights group on Thursday calling for a speedy end to the case. The Bushmen are taking Gaborone to court to challenge their eviction four years ago from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
If the forecasts are to be believed, Japan’s players in next month’s World Cup are small fish in a big pond. An aquarium in Yokohama is organising a piscine World Cup, in which fish the colours of national teams fight for a ball packed with bait in a tank holding two goal posts.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Thursday accepted Parliament’s rejection of a constitutional change that would have enabled him to stand for a third term in office, saying it was victory for democracy. "For me and for all members of our party, the outcome is victory for democracy," Obasanjo said.
An elderly woman died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Egypt on Thursday, marking the country’s sixth fatal case of the virus in humans, a World Health Organisation official (WHO) said. ”We have some basic information that she was a 75-year-old woman from al-Minya” in southern Egypt, WHO regional health regulation officer John Jabbour told Agence France-Presse.
Thousands of workers heeded a call by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) to down tools on Thursday in protest against South Africa’s high levels of unemployment and poverty. The mining and car-manufacturing industries appeared to be hardest hit.
The outlook for inflation continues to be generally favourable, with CPIX inflation expected to remain inside the target range until the end of the forecast period in 2008, South African Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni said on Thursday. He cautioned however that risks and challenges remained and that vigilance was required.
Italy’s financial police searched the offices of scandal-hit Serie A club Juventus on Thursday. Officers arrived early morning and went through documents. Former Juventus general director Luciano Moggi, the central figure of the Italian match-fixing scandal, has now been placed under formal investigation for suspected false accounting and tax evasion.