The Rolling Stones used to sit at the table in the corner for breakfast and their first snifter of the day. At 3pm. "That’s when their day started," says George Watson, owner of The Dock bar and restaurant in Montauk for 31 years. Officially part of the Hamptons, Montauk is in every sense another planet. Where the Hamptons is Gucci, Montauk is more grunge.
Benin customs police said on Thursday they have arrested four traffickers trying to smuggle 27 Beninese and Nigerian children out of the country on a minibus, first to Togo and then on to Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. The traffickers were stopped with the children aged between six and 12 at the Hillacondji customs post on the Togo border.
Hong Kong shut down for business and battened down the hatches as a tropical storm packing winds of 75kph slammed into the territory on Friday. At least two people were injured and 10 flights in and out of the city were cancelled before Tropical Storm Kompasu made landfall in the rural north-eastern Sai Kung district.
Eugene de Kock, the former Vlakplaas commander, on Thursday linked the 1989 Motherwell bombing to the earlier murder of activist Mathew Goniwe and three others, known as the Cradock Four. De Kock was testifying at the Gideon Nieuwoudt Truth and Reconciliation Committee amnesty hearing in Port Elizabeth.
Two more burial sites have been discovered in Kimberley, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Thursday. The finding comes after last May’s discovery of 180 unmarked graves in the city. Developers and archaeologists are divided as to what should be done about the matter.
The South African government’s policy to reduce the risk of mother-to-child transmission of HIV remains unchanged, Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Thursday. The Medicines Control Council has recommended that a combination of anti-retrovirals be used instead of a single dose of nevirapine.
Two fires broke out at exactly the same time in two buildings at the New Somerset hospital in Cape Town on Friday morning, emergency officials said. Officials suspect they were started on purpose. The fires were put out within 20 minutes of firefighters arriving on the scene.
South African elder statesman Nelson Mandela, who turns 86 on Sunday.
Revenge has been declared against a writer who dares to express an opinion on the overwhelming ”snow-whiteness” of a festival. Quite bizarre, reckons Mike van Graan. Hopefully, this issue will not dwarf others of concern.
A fire that may have been caused by a short circuit igniting a thatched roof killed at least 70 children and injured more than 100 others in a southern Indian school on Friday. An earlier report quoted a senior police official as saying 77 bodies had been recovered. Most of those killed and injured were four to 10 years old.