Zodwa Phiri witnesses young South Africans being educated every day. But Zodwa may never witness the education of her own children. This is because, as a cleaner for the University of Johannesburg, Zodwa earns R8,57 an hour and a meagre R1Â 300 a month.
Watch your back in South Africa. They kill folks here. Murder them at a bewildering rate. Robbers kill their victims, bystanders kill criminals, and family members kill each other. Gun battles erupt on streets or in shopping malls. Passers-by whip out pistols and join in firefights between criminals and police or security guards.
Australian pace bowler Glenn McGrath tempted fate on Tuesday when he named England’s stand-in captain Andrew Strauss and batsman Alastair Cook as his batting ”bunnies” (batsmen he intends to dominate) for the upcoming Ashes series. McGrath’s bold claim comes after he predicted a 5-0 whitewash to Australia in the last Ashes series.
Opposition parties in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have denounced parliamentary elections held on Sunday as ”fraudulent” while international observers have given the polls a cautious thumbs-up, according to news reports on Tuesday.
Some of the testosterone found in Tour de France winner Floyd Landis’s ”A” sample is from an external source and not his body’s, The New York Times said on Tuesday quoting an unidentified International Cycling Union official. The carbon-isotope test on the first of Landis’s two urine samples contains synthetic testosterone, said the official.
Visitors to the so-called Baltic Riviera will be impressed by the region’s long, white, sandy beaches and pine forest where hundreds of elaborately decorated old wooden houses nestle between the trees. In the past, this peninsula, located between the Baltic Sea and the River Lielupe, was called Riga Beach. Today, Jurmala is one of the most exclusive resorts anywhere on the Baltic coast.
The Indian Parliament was adjourned on Tuesday amid a bitter attack on the government over a wave of suicides by debt-ridden farmers in the country’s main cotton-growing belt. Opposition MPs blamed the policies of the Congress party-led government for the suicides, which activists say are continuing despite an economic aid package.
A 3m-long crocodile gave bathers at Cape Vidal beach in the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park the surprise of their lives this week, media reports said on Tuesday. The reptile wandered down in the surf on Sunday, possibly from nearby Lake Bhangazi and ended up in the main rockpool.
A pair of Chinese blogs maintained by a banned Tibetan writer have been shut down in an apparent attempt to block her distributing her work online, French monitoring group Reporters sans Frontières said on Tuesday. Attempts to connect to the blogs on Tuesday were returned with a message saying they did not exist.
Ignoring growing calls for a ceasefire, Israel blasted eastern and southern Lebanon from the air on Tuesday and prepared to advance deeper into Lebanese territory to push Hezbollah guerrillas back from the border. Three weeks after the war unexpectedly erupted, one Israeli minister said its armed forces needed at least another 10 days to complete its offensive.