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.
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.
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.
Trade unions on Friday said they will protect Durban Roodepoort Deep (DRD) miners in the North West from retrenchment following DRD’s warning that production must go up or they will lose their jobs. The National Union of Mineworkers believes DRD does not really want to mine in South Africa and wants to shift focus to Australasia.
The widow of a former body guard of South African Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni has instituted a claim for more than R2,9-million from a former Pretoria traffic officer and the Tshwane city council. Myra Smith’s husband, Davis Smith, was 29 when he was shot dead on the N1 highway near Rooihuiskraal on May 26 2000.
About 350 students of the University of the Free State handed over a memorandum on Friday demanding an end to the promotion of Afrikaans as a compulsory medium of instruction at the main campus. The students marched peacefully to the main campus entrance, before the memorandum was handed to university rector Frederick Fourie.
Sport in South Africa has fallen victim to African National Congress ”doublethink”, and the contradictions are crippling it, says Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon. ”Winning is losing, the ANC seems to believe. Or, as [the minister of sport] so bluntly put it … we should be willing to ‘sacrifice winning in the name of transformation’,” Leon says in his weekly newsletter.
The author Breyten Breytenbach said Senegalese police moved in on Friday morning to evict the Gorée Institute, of which he is director, from its offices on the former slave island of the same name. Though he said he does not know the reason for the eviction, it comes amid privatisation of state properties in Senegal.