Firefighters entered their 10th day on Tuesday evening fighting a blaze in the Franschhoek mountains above Dewdale farm. Danie Wilds, fire chief of Cape Winelands district municipality, said crews were still battling the same hot spots that have been their nemeses for the past couple of days.
As a chemist at one of the United States’s top medical firms, Helen Lee devised a way to screen blood for a common but deadly virus. The day her test hit the market, blood banks clamoured for it, making her bosses -million overnight. A scientist could be forgiven for revelling in the achievement, but Lee and a handful of others were uncomfortable.
Nasa’s forward-thinking Institute for Advanced Concepts, the organisation that first backed research into space elevators (think of a satellite tethered to Earth by a giant cable) has again made its annual call for revolutionary ideas lurking in the laboratories, or even just in the imagination, of United States space scientists.
The Likud party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Tuesday ordered his Cabinet ministers to quit the Israeli government. The ministers — including the Foreign Minister, Silvan Shalom — will hand in their letters of resignation at Sunday’s weekly Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu’s spokesperson, Ofir Akunis, said.
The United States on Tuesday renewed its terrorism warning for US citizens in or thinking of travelling to Kenya in a step likely to anger the Kenyan government which has long fought for the alert to be lifted. In a travel warning the State Department urged ”American citizens to consider carefully the risks of travel to Kenya at this time due to ongoing safety and security concerns”.
Llanelli Scarlets pledged on Tuesday to slap a life ban on the fan who confronted All Black great Jonah Lomu at Stradey Park during Monday’s Celtic League clash against Welsh rivals Cardiff. Lomu was verbally abused by a home supporter, who threw the ball away from the wing, during Cardiff’s 32-13 Celtic League defeat.
Free State farmers celebrating the rain that fell over the New Year are praying the wet weather carries on into the planting season to ease a drought that has crippled the province since November. Free State Agricultural Union director Pieter Moller said the recent rainfall had not broken the drought, but had brought great relief to the farmers.
Rescuers trying to reach 13 trapped miners in a United States coal mine said on Tuesday that they were ”very discouraged” at the levels of carbon monoxide they had detected. The dangerously high level of gas was discovered after a hole was successfully drilled into the tunnel where the miners are believed to be barricaded, about 80m below the surface.
Hunter S Thompson’s widow will co-edit a new magazine called The Woody Creeker, which is expected to hit newsstands next month. The gonzo journalist shot himself in his kitchen on February 20 last year, apparently despondent over health problems. ”We have some good writers already,” Anita Thompson told The Aspen Times.
A German documentary to be aired this week claims to have found new evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot United States president John Kennedy on the orders of the Cuban secret services. ”It was [Cuban leader Fidel] Castro’s vengeance for the CIA bid to assassinate him with a poisoned pen,” award-winning German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann says in the film.