Microsoft launched a redesigned MSN portal optimised for cellphones on Sunday, stepping up its offering at a time when more powerful devices increase the demand for richer content on handsets. There’s a new battle, a new frontline developing on the mobile phone,” said Phil Holden, Microsoft’s director of mobile web services.
Sudan is ready to attend Darfur peace talks under joint United Nations-African Union mediation to resolve a conflict that has driven 2,5-million people from their homes, its foreign minister said on Monday. The rebels have split into more than a dozen groups since a peace deal last year signed by only one of three rebel negotiating factions.
Pakistan on Monday deplored Britain’s decision to award a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses outraged many Muslims around the world. Rushdie was awarded a knighthood for services to literature in Queen Elizabeth’s birthday honours list published on Saturday.
Lesotho Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili was due in South Africa on Monday afternoon, a day before his scheduled talks with President Thabo Mbeki, the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. He would be welcomed at Cape Town International Airport by Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.
Further power cuts maybe on the cards as Eskom workers prepare to down tools. Three unions representing two-thirds of Eskom employees will take action against the parastatal from July 4 if their wage demands are not met, they announced at a joint press briefing in Johannesburg on Monday.
Tony Blair on Monday strongly defended intervening in Iraq for the final time as British prime minister before Parliament’s top scrutiny body. In a robust farewell performance, Blair insisted ordinary Muslims craved democracy, saying that Islamist terrorists rather than the West were their worst enemy.
Luthuli Dlamini, who has played the character of Stan Nyati in e.tv’s soap opera <i>Scandal</i>, is feared missing. His agent, who would not divulge his full name, on Monday confirmed that the actor was missing and that he had not heard from him. "I left messages on his phone this morning and at the moment I haven’t heard anything," he said.
Fifa president Sepp Blatter arrived in South Africa on Monday for talks with organisers of the 2010 Soccer World Cup and for his first on-site inspection of work to build and upgrade the stadiums. This is the Swiss’s first visit to the 2010 World Cup hosts since work began to build and upgrade stadiums.
Springbok loose forward Joe van Niekerk will be lost to South African rugby after the World Cup, which is to be played in France in September. With the emergence of new talented players coming through the ranks, Van Niekerk has opted to take his services abroad to Northampton Saints.
Unidentified gunmen have occupied an oil pipeline-switching centre in Nigeria and are preventing local security forces from leaving, company officials said on Monday. About two dozen Nigerian workers and soldiers are being held after the attack on Sunday on a flow station in southern Bayelsa state, Italian energy giant Eni Spa said in a statement. No injuries were reported, it said.