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.
The European Union said on Monday it would resume financial aid to the new Fatah-led Palestinian government, as part of international efforts to isolate Hamas in its Gaza stronghold. The EU, along with other Western donors, cut off aid after the Islamist movement won a general election in January 2006.
A 16-year-old Berlin student was so worried he would have to repeat a year at school because of poor marks he convinced two friends to storm his class and steal the report cards with his bad grades. The youth sat quietly at the back of the classroom as the two masked robbers, aged 14 and 15, burst in and threatened his teacher with a steel bar.
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.
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.
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.