On the day we visited Bongani Hospital in Welkom, Free State, the CEO was frantically trying to decide what to do with a R12million winning Lotto ticket after the owner had just died in the hospital. Alida Zwiegelaar was very proud that her staff had been honest enough to hand over the ticket, particularly as the owner had not signed it.
The willingness of the courts to issue interdicts preventing newspapers from publishing has become a deeply disturbing trend. Last week’s order, obtained by MTN head Maanda Manyatshe in the Johannesburg High Court, was the third of its kind in the space of a year. Earlier, some Sunday newspapers were barred from publishing the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad, and an Oilgate report in the Mail & Guardian was blocked.
Not long after puny Pluto was stripped of its planethood, Janis Robinson started selling ”Pluto is a planet” T-shirts on the internet. Robinson, who said she ”rolled her eyes” after Pluto got the boot, hopes her buyers will send a message that kicking out the far-out rock is downright goofy.
Uganda has agreed to a conditional cessation of hostilities with rebels to end a brutal 19-year insurgency in the north of the country. The deal is dependent on the Lord’s Resistance Army sending its fighters to assembly points in southern Sudan and northern Uganda where they could be monitored.
Iran has completed a new phase in its Arak heavy-water reactor plant, a presidential official said on Saturday, referring to part of Iran’s atomic programme which the West fears is aimed at producing bombs. The official said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would give a speech later in the day ”announcing that the heavy-water project has become operational”.
A government decision to appeal a Durban High Court ruling forcing it to provide anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment to prisoners infected with HIV/Aids is ”a matter of principle”, the health department said on Friday. ”It is not about [government] refusing to give people treatment,” said director-general of the health department Thamsanqa Mseleku.
A year after Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast and left New Orleans in ruins, United States President George Bush is still grappling with the political fall-out from a federal response widely viewed as inept. As the storm’s August 29 anniversary approaches, memories are being rekindled of corpses and debris piling up in the streets and desperate victims pleading for help from rooftops.
The European Union is to mount the biggest military operation in its history after agreeing on Friday to commit more than 7Â 000 ground troops for a United Nations mission policing the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire. The EU, at a meeting of its foreign ministers in Brussels, also agreed to send a further 2Â 000 specialist forces, mainly providing naval and air support.
It could have been 1995 all over again … a flashback to the soaking France-South Africa World Cup semifinal as the rain pelted down in buckets ahead of the match between the Sharks and Western Province in Durban on Friday evening. By halftime 32 mm of rain had been measured at the ground.
Oil prices rose on Friday as the market watched Iran’s stand-off with the West over its nuclear programme and amid concerns that tropical storms could threaten United States Gulf coast oil refineries. Prices fell earlier in the week after US Department of Energy weekly data showed a rise in gasoline stockpiles.