Spaniard Alberto Contador won the drug-tainted Tour de France in Paris on Sunday when he held on to his 23-second overnight lead on Australia’s Cadel Evans to secure the race’s fabled yellow jersey. Contador becomes the first Spaniard to win the three-week race since Miguel Indurain from 1991 to 1995.
Soon after I started working at the SABC in 2002, I was asked to chair a panel to hear the appeal of a Limpopo reporter who had been dismissed for "bringing the SABC into disrepute". The man had killed his wife. He was appealing his dismissal because, as he said, it was his own wife and he had done it "on his own time" — he had been on leave. We rejected his appeal, and later the courts sentenced him to a lengthy jail term.
More than a half-century after he finished the requirements to earn the rank, an 88-year-old man was honored as an Eagle Scout, making him possibly the oldest person yet to collect the Boy Scout honour. Walter Hart could not become an Eagle Scout at the time he earned the rank because his service in World War II got in the way.
The army was called out for rescue operations on Sunday as more than a million people were marooned in north-east India, which has been hit by raging floods, officials said. The latest deaths took to 15 the number of people killed in flood-related accidents in the past week in Assam and adjoining Meghalaya.
South African publishers have placed restrictions on the comic book Tintin in the Congo following complaints of racism in Britain. The illustrated work by Belgian author-cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under a pen name, is the second in a series of 23 tracing the adventures of Tintin and his dog, Snowy.
The Liberian government has lifted a self-imposed moratorium on the mining, sale and export of diamonds that had been in place for six years, officials said on Saturday. Deputy Minister of Lands, Mines and Energy Kpandeh Fayia said that, ”as of Monday, people can start applying for mining, selling and broker licences” for the stones.
Libya on Saturday denounced a decision by Bulgaria’s president to pardon six medics from life jail terms in an Aids case as a ”betrayal” and illegal. ”The detainees should have been detained upon their arrival [in Sofia], and not freed in this celebratory and illegal manner,” Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel Rahman Shalgham said.
The life of Zimbabwe’s paper money has been extended by another year, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported on Saturday. Zimbabwe’s latest set of bearer cheques was introduced in July last year, when Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono slashed three zeros from the local dollar.
A corruption scandal is rattling Nigeria’s navy after officials revealed that two vice-admirals and eight officers now retired are suspected of having been involved in contraband petrol trafficking in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Contraband petrol represents a huge loss for Africa’s biggest oil-producing country.
President Laurent Gbagbo will on Monday be in Bouake, the headquarters of the former rebel New Forces, for the first time since a 2002 uprising aimed at toppling him divided Côte d’Ivoire in half. It was from Bouake that the northern half of this West African country was controlled by rebels for nearly five years.