Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Saturday she does not know who her new deputy will be. She was touring Durban’s Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital to see what improvements had taken place at the hospital’s maternity and neonatal wards where a klebsiella outbreak claimed the lives of 22 babies in 2005.
Heavy rains continued to wreak havoc in East and Central Africa on Saturday as floods that have already displaced hundreds of thousands heightened fears of food shortages and disease outbreaks across the region. In Uganda, high waters submerged entire villages and destroyed many farms in the east of the country.
A Turkish plane heading for Istanbul from northern Cyprus was hijacked on Saturday, but the hijackers gave themselves up and released all hostages five hours after forcing the plane to land in Turkey. CEO of Atlas Jet airline Tuncay Doganer confirmed that the hijack of the passenger plane had come to an end.
An enraged man in a western Ugandan district took a machete and hacked to death his wife and six children before hanging himself, the government press reported on Saturday. Abdallah Byekwaso cut his children aged two to 13 beyond recognition and beheaded one of his sons.
The Bush administration is preparing a case to designate the Horn of Africa nation of Eritrea a ”state sponsor of terrorism” for its alleged support of al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militants in Somalia, the top United States diplomat for Africa said on Friday. Officials are compiling evidence of Eritrean backing for the extremists to support the designation.
Twelve-year-old Mohammed Abdelaziz’s brother said he screamed in pain as he was tortured in Egyptian police custody, but his screams are now silent. Pictures recently published on a popular Egyptian blog showed Mohammed dead with signs of torture all over his skinny little body.
When On the Road came out in 1957, Jack Kerouac became the voice of the beat generation almost overnight. Now, 50 years on, the tale of disaffected youth struggling to find a place in post-war America is to be re-released in its original form, unedited, cruder and more erotic.
Peruvians frustrated over slow emergency aid looted pharmacies and scuffled in food lines on Friday as rescuers picked through rubble for survivors two days after a massive earthquake killed at least 510 people. A powerful aftershock renewed panic on Friday and some people sprinted away from food lines in Pisco.
Tiger Woods’s withdrawal from the first event of the PGA Tour’s new four-event play-off series didn’t surprise many of his rivals. The FedEx Cup series, which will culminate with next month’s Tour Championship, was designed to bring all the tour’s top players together for four straight weeks.
Cricket South Africa is mourning the loss of Cecil Abrahams, who played with Basil D’Oliveira’s famous South African non-racial team against Kenya in home-and-away tours in the 1950s, and who has passed away in the United Kingdom. Abrahams died in Manchester on August 15 aged 75.