A passenger was escorted off a Tokyo-bound plane in Hong Kong after she refused to put her Gucci handbag under the seat, disrupting the flight for more than an hour, a report said on Monday. The Cathay Pacific plane was ready to take off but was forced to stop on the runway because the young passenger would not listen to a flight attendant’s request, the <i>Apple Daily</i> reported.
It was an unremarkable three-storey building on the edge of town. But for two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, it was a last refuge. They could not afford the extortionate taxi fares to Tyre and hoped that if they all crouched together on the ground floor they would be safe.
Millions of Congolese voted enthusiastically in their first free elections in over 40 years on Sunday, hoping to end years of war, corruption and chaos that have brought the mineral-rich African giant to its knees. United Nations officials and foreign observers said turnout was high and voting was mostly orderly and peaceful at the landmark polls.
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KwaZulu-Natal judge president Vuka Tshabalala was on Monday morning still not providing the name of the man who will preside over African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma’s corruption case. ”You don’t have long to go before he [the judge] enters the court,” Tshabalala said on Monday, barely an hour before Zuma’s case begins in Pietermaritzburg.
Adekeye Adebajo argues that the formation of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation is a dubious attempt to rehabilitate the legacy of Rhodes and bemoans Mandela’s association with this attempt. However, his article suggests that he understands very little about what the foundation stands for or seeks to promote, writes Tristan Görgens.
Two months ago Justin Gatlin, the joint world 100m record holder and reigning Olympic sprint champion, gave a remarkably prescient interview to the magazine Sports Illustrated: ”I understand what it would mean to track and field if I ever tested positive or went down in some scandal. Not to have an ego about it, but it might be the KO for our sport.”
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Monday she believed a ceasefire to end fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah guerrilla group in Lebanon could be forged this week. Rice told reporters in Jerusalem that she would call for a United Nations resolution this week on the ceasefire and also the establishment of an international stabilisation force for Lebanon.
Lesley-Ann van Selm, MD of Khulisa, one of the country’s most effective crime rehabilitation organisations, could have been forgiven if she had joined the chicken run after what happened in May this year. Her daughter Jackie was shot in the neck in a daylight hijacking outside her boyfriend’s Johannesburg home.
Environmental activists are pitting government departments against each other in a desperate bid to save Gauteng’s last wild mountain space from becoming a concrete jungle. Without drastic intervention, they warn, the popular Walter Sisulu National Botanical Gardens on the West Rand will be decimated by townhouse estate development.
Bongani Nxumalo ”stole” a firearm from a relative to carry out the robbery that put him in jail for five years. Another firearm, from a friend, was only a call away. ”Guns are easy to get,” he said in an interview recently. Soft-spoken Nxumalo was recently paroled from the Emthonjeni juvenile section of Pretoria’s Baviaanspoort Correctional Centre.