The United States’s military top brass may have deliberately misled the 9/11 commission, painting a picture of a swift response to the unfolding terrorist attacks when, in reality, fighter jets spent crucial minutes pursuing a non-existent plane, it emerged on Wednesday.
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The Presidency is considering a request from Jacob Zuma for financial assistance in his corruption trial, South African Broadcasting Corporation radio news reported on Thursday. It quoted chief operations officer Trevor Fowler as saying the matter was being discussed by lawyers.
A woman jumped off a Durban beach pier with her three-year-old son strapped to her back in an apparent suicide bid on Wednesday night. Inspector Tray Allison of the police search and rescue unit said fishermen on the Wedge Beach Pier saw the woman climb over the railings and jump into the water.
Israeli jets pounded Hezbollah’s Beirut stronghold and troops battled the guerrillas in the south on Thursday while world powers struggled to come up with a plan to stop a war now in its fourth week. The United States, France and Britain hope for a United Nations Security Council resolution within a week that would call for a truce and perhaps beef up existing United Nations peacekeepers.
South African banking group Absa cautioned on Thursday that its headline earnings for the second half of the year could be somewhat lower than that achieved in the first six months. The group’s earnings for the first half of the year ended June were up 22,4% to R3,46-billion compared to pro forma earnings of R2,83-billion for the corresponding period of the previous financial year.
At last — leadership from President Thabo Mbeki on a crisis that, by his own admission, has gripped the ruling African National Congress for two years. He told his party’s warring factions to stop putting petty turf battles before the real work of development. He asked what ANC branches were doing to ensure the provision of decent sanitation and adequate water supplies.
”This is a machine for walking like an Egyptian. This one crunches apples like Catherine Deneuve. And that’s a spit for roasting Joan of Arc.” In its 100-year existence, Paris’s majestic Grand Palais museum has never hosted anything like it — a battery of barmy Heath Robinson contraptions that clang, creak, explode and generally make people laugh.
On Sunday, next to the gutted and destroyed house in Qana, seven bodies lay covered with bedsheets, a blanket and a prayer mat. One small arm stretched out from under the sheets; thin, the arm of a little girl, a piece of cloth like a bracelet wrapped around the wrist. As bodies were loaded on the stretcher, I saw another dead girl, writes Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.
The manne with timeshares on the West Coast near the Visdorp are selling. Their logic is simple. Nobody was suspended when Koeberg broke. Alec Erwin still hasn’t found somewhere to pin his loose bolt, and hasn’t had to prove his allegations. So just exactly what did five employees have to do to get suspended this week?
The Democratic Alliance has officially asked Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Brigitte Mabandla to release a two-year-old report on compensation for crime victims. DA spokesperson Dianne Kohler-Barnard has also promised to invoke the Access to Information Act should Mabandla fail to comply.