The Mail & Guardian is going ahead with plans to screen a controversial documentary on President Thabo Mbeki at its Critical Thinking Forum in Johannesburg this week — despite possible legal action against the documentary’s producer by the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
Alexander Vinokourov’s hopes of winning the Tour de France ended in tears when he failed to keep up with the top contenders in the ninth stage, a 159,5km ride from Val d’Isere to Briancon on Tuesday. The Kazakh rider finished three minutes and 24 seconds behind stage winner Juan Mauricio Soler of the Barloworld team.
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Brazilian soccer great Pele and three-time African player of the year Samuel Eto’o of Cameroon delivered a special birthday gift on Tuesday to former South African president Nelson Mandela. The players are among 50 past and present international stars taking part in a soccer friendly to mark his 89th birthday on Wednesday.
A strong earthquake hit East Africa on Tuesday, the latest in the region in several days, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said. The USGS said the quake struck in northern Tanzania, 167km from the western town of Arusha, and measured 6,1 on the Richter scale of magnitude.
Libya has paid funds to more than half the families of Libyan children with HIV under a deal that could free six foreign medics condemned to death for infecting them, a spokesperson for the families said on Tuesday. The financial settlement may bring to a close the eight-year legal case surrounding the medics and the children.
A Spanish judge has taken away visiting rights from a man who took his 10-year-old son to a running of the bulls during the annual Pamplona festival last week, Spanish media reported on Tuesday. The boy’s mother filed a police complaint after seeing a photograph published in a newspaper of her smiling ex-husband leading their son by the arm just a few steps ahead of the bulls.
The families of Libyan children infected with the Aids have dropped demands for the death penalty in the case of six foreign medics on death row in the case, a spokesperson said on Tuesday. The announcement came as Libya’s top legal body was to rule on Tuesday on the medics’ fate.
The Harry Potter books have spawned a parallel universe on the internet, where sites attract millions of fans every day and play a major part in the success of the novels and their Hollywood adaptations. So popular are JK Rowling’s stories, and the web pages built around them, that a handful of online fans have become stars in their own right.
A British employment tribunal ordered rock star Sting and his wife Trudie Styler to pay 000 in compensation on Tuesday for wrongfully dismissing their former chef. Jane Martin, who cooked for Sting and his family at their country estate in England, filed a claim in July last year saying she had been sacked by Styler after revealing she was pregnant.
A joint working group under the chairpersonship of President Thabo Mbeki has concluded that the targets set by the Growth and Development Summit four years ago have been 90% fulfilled. A figure of 4,2% is outstanding and 5,8% could be described as work in progress. The group met at the Union Buildings on Tuesday.