The Democratic Alliance’s nominated representative to join the Southern African Development Community’s observer mission to Zimbabwe for that country’s election, has been excluded. In a statement on Friday, DA Chief Whip Douglas Gibson said the exclusion of MP Dianne Kohler-Barnard was ”an outrage”.
Martha Stewart, who indoctrinated millions in the importance of pastel hues and perfectly turned pie crusts, left her prison cell to return to the kitchen of her palatial home yesterday to begin a new, and potentially even more dizzying, chapter in her life as America’s household goddess.
China will spend an extra 12,6 % on its armed forces this year, the government announced on Friday, adding to Washington’s fear that the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait is tilting towards Beijing. With its 2,5-million soldiers, the People’s Liberation Army is the world’s biggest armed force.
About 7 000 people living as slaves in Niger will be told that they are free for the first time in their lives, as the government begins to enforce a law banning the practice of slavery. The government is expected to hold a ceremony to explain the law to people who have spent their whole lives as the property of their masters.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair will next week demand a radical shake-up of the west’s approach to the world’s poorest continent when his year-long Africa Commission calls for a doubling of aid, the dismantling of trade barriers, the writing off of debts and immediate action to stamp out corruption.
When a rocket carrying a weather satellite blasted into orbit last weekend it did more than restore confidence in Japan’s battered space programme — it ignited talk of a space race with the country’s old rival, China. The emerging contest between these two Asian powers is already showing signs of ferocity.
The mother and son at the centre of the Michael Jackson allegations were shown in video footage yesterday praising the 46-year-old singer and insisting there was nothing untoward about his relationship with the boy. The prosecution insisted that the video of the pair said was staged.
Umbumbulo, a rural village near Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, was the scene of brutal conflict in the early 1990s between the Inkatha Freedom Party and African National Congress, which left orphans, widows and a shattered community in its wake.
Governments could allow up to 89-million HIV/Aids infections to develop virtually unchallenged in Africa over the next 20 years by failing to take effective measures and boost funding, a United Nations study issued on Friday warned. Half of these could be averted if leaders take the right steps and significant foreign aid is forthcoming, said the report.
A practical joker scared Welsh pub-goers by placing a 60cm snake in the coin-return slot of a jukebox, it was reported on Friday. Fourteen-year-old publican’s daughter Stacey Caldwell got the fright of her life when she found a boa constrictor coiled up in the coin-return slot in the pub in Cym, South Wales.