The inclusion of the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions prevented the African National Congress-led government from ”tilting to the right”, ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma said on Thursday. Speaking in Durban, he said that if workers and communists are not there, ”we are likely to tilt to the right”.
The South African government will look more closely at crimes against women, President Thabo Mbeki told a national Women’s Day event in the Northern Cape on Thursday. Mbeki said the government and the Presidential Women’s Working Group had agreed to look at the issue in a ”more detailed and specific fashion”.
An amateur palaeontologist in Switzerland may have unearthed Europe’s largest dinosaur mass grave after he dug up the remains of two Plateosaurus. The dinosaurs’ bones came to light during house-building in the village of Frick, near the German border.
The Young Communist League (YCL) on Thursday called for charges to be brought against Congress of South African Trade Unions president Willie Madisha and a Pretoria businessman over a missing R500 000 donation. There has been an acceptance from Madisha that he received the money, ”so we think the police should open a case”, said YCL spokesperson Castro Ngobese.
Former world champion Mika Hakkinen says the competition provided by Lewis Hamilton has current world champion Fernando Alonso rattled. The pair are teammates at McLaren-Mercedes but Spaniard Alonso is said to be not speaking to Hamilton after a series of incidents between the pair in the Briton’s rookie season.
Foreign medics freed from a Libyan jail were tortured into confessing they deliberately infected hundreds of Libyan children with HIV, a son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi said in remarks broadcast on Thursday. The five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were freed on July 24 after a deal between Tripoli and the European Union.
Nearly 100 people have drowned in floods in Sudan, where rivers have burst their banks, inundating villages and farm lands, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Thursday. The toll over the past month was reported by the Sudanese Red Crescent, which has been leading the humanitarian response to the flooding.
President Thabo Mbeki does not have to give reasons for why he dismissed deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, the Presidency said on Thursday. A decision by Mbeki had been taken and it had been implemented, said presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga. ”The president doesn’t have to provide reasons.”
Her blonde hair dripping with salt water, top Austrian kitesurfer Gabi Steidl cuts through the translucent, emerald green waves of the Indian Ocean. Kitesurfing — a hi-tech hybrid of surfing and kite-flying — is fast winning converts: riders harnessed to kites who stand on boards and skim, surf or even leap, often hanging in the air for several seconds.
It has pristine beaches, lush highlands and an exotic cultural mix — and lies just a few hours’ flight east of the Indonesian resort island of Bali. But currently almost the only overseas visitors to East Timor are foreign troops, journalists and aid workers after Asia’s youngest nation descended into turmoil last year.