China faced mounting pressure on Tuesday to honour pledges of media freedom made for the 2008 Olympics, with two Western groups accusing the government of harassing and unfairly jailing journalists. Reports by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch said reporters still faced intimidation just a year before the Beijing Games.
Miner Xstrata announced a -billion offer for South Africa’s Eland Platinum Holdings and met forecasts with a 47% rise in first-half net profit on Tuesday. Swiss-based Xstrata said its R105-a-share cash offer was 14% above Eland’s 30-day volume-weighted average price and that it had secured support from shareholders owning 51% of the South African firm.
Hordes of French gourmets joined forces at an annual snail festival over the weekend to munch their way through a record 100 800 gastropods, organisers said on Monday. "We’ve beaten all our previous records, despite the rain," said Jacky Pommier, who helped organise the festival, in Digoin, east of Paris.
There is a good reason for the speculation that has engulfed the future of Blackburn Rovers striker Benni McCarthy this summer. After years of being linked with a move to the Premiership, Rovers finally took a punt on the South African star and reaped the rewards, with the powerful forward hitting 18 league goals.
A break-in at a Durban beachfront flat rented by African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma ”does not appear to be a random act of crime”, a media report said on Tuesday. The report said it appeared the intruder rifled through the ANC deputy president’s documents.
Nasa managers on Monday cleared space shuttle Endeavour and seven astronauts, including a former school teacher who trained with the ill-fated Challenger crew, for launch on Wednesday. The crew plans to spend seven to 10 days at the International Space Station, which is a little more than half finished.
The toll from floods across South Asia soared to nearly 1 900 on Tuesday as water levels in the region’s swollen rivers started to recede. Aid workers struggled to deliver supplies to some of the 28-million people displaced across India, Bangladesh and Nepal by the worst monsoon-triggered flooding in decades.
Ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday that two Russian fighter jets had violated its airspace and dropped a 700kg bomb, but this had not exploded. Shota Utiashvili, the head of the interior ministry’s public relations department, said that the bomb was dropped on the village of Tsitelubani, about 65km north-west of Tbilisi.
Sasol welcomed on Tuesday the National Treasury’s decision not to impose a windfall tax on synthetic fuel producers. ”Our government’s growth vision for the synthetic fuel sector is encouraging,” said Sasol chief executive Pat Davies. Davies said Sasol had started the first phase of ”significantly expanding” existing synthetic fuels capacity in Secunda.
All the fuel industry workers who were on strike over the last week would return to work on Tuesday after accepting an 8,5% wage increase. ”We hope that at least by the afternoon shift everybody would have gone back to work,” said Keith Jacobs, spokesperson for the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood, and Allied Workers’ Union.