Springbok team manager Zola Yeye on Wednesday rejected media reports that coach Jake White had been instructed not to talk to the media. In a statement issued from the team training camp in Bloemfontein, Yeye said a television station and a newspaper group incorrectly reported that White had been gagged, when that was, in fact, not the case.
Battling against a deeply patriarchal society, Arab Israeli and Palestinian lesbian women are uniting to break the taboo of homosexuality and politicise the right to be female and gay. ”We are Palestinian, we are women and we are gay,” is the slogan coined by Aswat, the association campaigning for lesbian Arabs to be accepted in Israeli and Palestinian society.
Du Yansheng, a farmer on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, hasn’t gone without his morning cup of coffee in five decades, not even during the Cultural Revolution — when such ”mock-Western” practices could have landed him in prison. ”People here have never stopped drinking coffee,” Du says in Xinglong, the cradle of coffee culture in an otherwise tea-drinking country.
Police arrested 31 people on Tuesday afternoon after a protest in the Petsana township near Reitz in the Free State. Sergeant Mmako Mophiring said the people arrested faced charges of public violence, damage to state property, vandalism and being in possession of stolen goods.
In what may be a first for South Africa, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) on Tuesday announced that it had launched a beauty pageant in KwaZulu-Natal. And the search for Miss IFP KwaZulu-Natal has already received overwhelming interest, according to the IFP’s Sipho Mbatha, the organiser behind the event.
A former pupil of Ithuteng Trust school principal Jackie Maarohanye, who turned state witness against her and one of her co-accused, was arrested in the Protea Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday. Police spokesperson Constable Sefako Xaba said Simphiwe Ncoguthu (24) was arrested in connection with a theft case levelled against him by Maarohanye in 2005.
Jamaican police Deputy Commissioner Mark Shields said the Bob Woolmer case is being investigated as a murder despite reports the Pakistan cricket coach died of a heart attack. ”As I have said from day one, we will be keeping an open mind and looking at all angles. Please give us more time,” Shields told the Jamaica Observer.
Despite African National Congress (ANC) comments to the contrary, businessman Tokyo Sexwale has confirmed that he is being lobbied for the post of party president, South African Broadcasting Corporation news reported on Tuesday. Lobbying would be followed by nominations and Sexwale said he would want to know why he was wanted.
Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad says the ”great concern” raised by print and broadcasting media over the Film and Publications Board Amendment Bill will be taken seriously. ”There will be no effort to curb media freedom,” he said, speaking at the end of debate in the National Assembly on his department’s budget vote.
United States astronomers on Tuesday presented the most solid proof yet of the existence of dark matter, a mysterious substance believed to make up more than a quarter of the universe. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a ring of dark matter in a galaxy cluster about five billion light years away from Earth.