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/ 6 November 2007
As a teenager I found a book by Elizabeth Hand called the Aestival Tide. It was a bizarre and terrifying vision of the future, blighted by nuclear disaster and man’s own monstrosity; a book that I couldn’t forget although I never found anything else by Hand … until now that is, writes Lynley Donnelly.
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/ 5 November 2007
If there is one certainty in turbulent times in good old Mzansi, then it’s the black male’s fascination with white balls. For such an oft-studied species, one wonders why the social anthropologists don’t include this crucial racial marker in their monographs. Yet it’s been there all along — right up there with inyama (and bringing it home), writes Khadija Bradlow.
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/ 5 November 2007
Last week Kenya’s newly selected cardinal — and for reasons that are obscure to me, we have not had one in a while — came out to declare that the Catholic Church opposes majimboism. To its supporters, majimboism is a kind of federalism; to its detractors it looks a lot like ethnic regionalism.
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/ 5 November 2007
Italian police on Monday arrested Salvatore lo Piccolo, who is suspected to have become the new head of the Sicilian Mafia following the 2006 arrest of the former ”boss of bosses” Bernardo Provenzano. In a morning operation, about 40 police officers surrounded and then raided a villa near the Sicilian capital, Palermo.
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/ 5 November 2007
Olievenhoutbosch serial killer Richard Jabulani Nyauza smiled and said he ”felt nothing” after being given 16 life terms in the Pretoria High Court on Monday for a series of gruesome murders. ”I feel nothing. They’re doing too little. It changes nothing,” the HIV-positive Nyauza told reporters before being led down to the court cells.
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/ 5 November 2007
Fire tore through a retirement home in central Russia, killing 30 people while two others are still missing, a senior local official was quoted as saying on Monday. The home near the city of Tula did not have basic safety equipment and police have started a criminal investigation into the latest in a series of fire disasters in Russia.
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/ 5 November 2007
A gunman shot and wounded an employee and killed a patient at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital on Monday afternoon, Gauteng police said. The man entered the hospital during visiting hours at about 3.45pm and opened fire, said Captain Phillemon Khorombi. ”He shot a 52-year-old female employee and a male patient aged 35.”
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/ 5 November 2007
The naming and renaming of streets and public places in Johannesburg should be after flora and fauna and not people, according to the city’s new naming policy released on Monday. Anyone who wants a place named after a person will have to provide a detailed motivation, including a profile of the person.
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/ 5 November 2007
Egypt put the mummy of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun on display in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings on Sunday, giving visitors their first chance to see the face of a ruler who died more than 3 000 years ago. The mummy’s face has high cheekbones and cracked and blackened skin with an intact nose.
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/ 5 November 2007
Fear and mistrust gripped Wall Street on Monday after Citigroup’s CEO quit in the wake of mounting credit losses and an influential money manager called the subprime mortgage market a ”-trillion problem”. US stocks followed European shares lower, while safe-haven bonds rallied and even the downtrodden dollar ticked up.