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/ 7 September 2007
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The 2007 Rugby World Cup kicked off in France on Friday night, filling the Cup stadium in Paris with colour and movement in a somewhat bizarre ceremony that was shorter and much less grandiose than those of soccer and the Olympics. Thousands of spectators watched as drummers surrounded the field and beat out loud rhythms on big, red oil drums as planes flew past trailing red and blue smoke.
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/ 7 September 2007
Police fired rubber bullets at a group of striking refuse workers who turned violent in Pretoria West on Friday, stoning waste-removal trucks. Captain Lucas Sithole said about 200 workers gathered outside the city’s waste-management offices at 12.30pm.
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/ 7 September 2007
Jealousy may have been at the centre of the murder of two women accused of bewitching a northern KwaZulu-Natal school, a teachers’ union reported on Friday. National Teachers’ Union spokesperson Allen Thompson said investigations by the union had revealed that one of the women burnt to death last Monday had a granddaughter at Manhlenga High School.
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/ 7 September 2007
Chad will back United Nations moves to end the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region by allowing international peacekeepers on its own soil and supporting peace talks, President Idriss Itno Déby said on Friday. Déby made the commitment to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who was in Chad on a regional tour to canvass support for the UN’s peacekeeping initiative for Darfur.
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/ 7 September 2007
DRAMA OF THE WEEK: Peter Bradshaw travels back in time to the days of the Berlin Wall and the brutalities of the Stasi.
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/ 7 September 2007
Hamas security officers beat protesters, hurled stun grenades and fired in the air to disperse open-air prayers the rival Fatah faction held in the Gaza Strip on Friday in defiance of the territory’s Islamist rulers. Palestinian medical officials said at least 20 people, some with gunshot wounds, were taken to hospital for treatment.
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/ 7 September 2007
The South African government’s attitude to global warming was very encouraging, chief scientific adviser to the British government David King said on Friday. The South African-born King, who is in the country for a series of ministerial meetings on a range of issues, also gave the thumbs-up to this country’s planned pebble-bed modular nuclear reactor.
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/ 7 September 2007
German soccer legend Franz Beckenbauer visited the construction site of Cape Town’s 2010 Soccer World Cup stadium on Friday and declared himself ”very, very impressed” with preparations. ”I am very, very impressed with the construction going on in Cape Town and it’s fantastic what the people in South Africa are doing in preparing themselves for the World Cup in 2010,” he said.
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/ 7 September 2007
President Robert Mugabe’s exchange-rate devaluation and promises of tax relief were dismissed on Friday by Zimbabweans weary of an economic crisis marked by the world’s highest inflation and severe shortages. His government’s latest bid to ease the economic turmoil, announced in a supplementary budget on Thursday, highlighted the worsening plight of the Southern African nation.
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/ 7 September 2007
One of the Cape Town councillors embroiled in the city’s floor-crossing battle said on Friday she did not know what party she belonged to any more. Georgina Sass was one of five Independent Democrats members that the newly formed National People’s Party claimed on Thursday had defected to it.