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/ 12 October 2007
It’s almost sunset at Soweto’s Orlando Power Park Dam and the wind is blowing gently. Three boys, aged 13, emerge from a clump of trees in the park carrying two canoes on their heads. Yanga Mphalala, Sifiso Cebekhulu and Siseko Ntondini are members of the Soweto Canoe and Recreation Club, based at the dam.
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/ 12 October 2007
Britain’s Virgin Group, controlled by entrepreneur Richard Branson, is in talks to take over troubled bank Northern Rock, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday. The group could lead a consortium including Middle East and United States investors that would inject cash in exchange for a controlling stake.
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/ 12 October 2007
Clinton Nassif, the former security chief of the late Brett Kebble, has entered into a plea bargain with the Scorpions, the Germiston Magistrate’s Court heard on Friday. Scorpions prosecutor Gerrie Nel told magistrate James Van Wyk that Nassif had entered into the plea bargain relating to the drug dealing charges against him.
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/ 12 October 2007
The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded on Friday to former United States vice-president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was awarded ”for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.
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/ 12 October 2007
The women’s 100m in Sydney was the first Olympic final I commentated on for the BBC. Marion Jones streaked to a victory so emphatic that the words that came out were an athlete’s reaction to what I’d witnessed: ”Wow! This is the Olympic Games. You’re not supposed to win by that much.”
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/ 12 October 2007
Airline passengers will from next year be able to check-in using cellphone technology, a media report said on Friday. The International Air Transport Association said on Thursday that paper tickets, which use magnetic-strip technology instead of barcodes, would no longer be accepted from June.
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/ 12 October 2007
Sudan’s National Congress Party (NCP) of President Omar al-Bashir on Friday criticised the decision by former southern rebels to withdraw from the Khartoum government. "The heart of the problem is that a group within the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement wants to end our partnership," the northern NCP’s number two, Nafie Ali Nafie, said.
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/ 12 October 2007
Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened on Friday in talks with United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to abandon a key nuclear-missile treaty, while also telling Washington to freeze plans for a European anti-missile shield. The Kremlin leader said the Cold War-era INF treaty limiting Russian and US short- and medium-range missiles was outmoded.
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/ 12 October 2007
A bomb killed a child and wounded 13 others in a playground as they celebrated the Islamic festival of Eid on Friday in the northern Iraqi town of Tuz Khurmato, police said. Police Colonel Abbas Mohammed said a would-be suicide bomber hid the explosives in a cart he was pushing that was filled with children’s toys.
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/ 12 October 2007
It is an intriguing image. Shot among the birch trees and snow of a Siberian forest, two policemen kiss each other passionately on the lips. They hold and possibly caress each other’s buttocks. But the work by a Russian art collective has proved too much for Russia’s Culture Minister, Alexander Sokolov.