Todd Hardwick’s cellphone has not stopped ringing for a week. May is always the busiest month for Florida’s handful of licensed alligator trappers but three fatal attacks in six days have left residents of the sunshine state jittery. ”They’ve just gone crazy about gators,” said Hardwick, whose company has a contract with the state to remove ”nuisance” reptiles from lakes and canals.
The world of the booth babe, it is fair to say, has been rent asunder by recent events in Los Angeles. Midriffs have been covered, skin-tight tops have been loosened and hem lines have plummeted. The annual E3 fair at the hulking LA Convention Centre decided this year to enforce a long-standing, much-ignored rule: exhibitors must abide by the norms of common, adult decency.
Eritrea on Tuesday for the first time confirmed it would attend talks in London this week aimed at resolving border tensions with its arch-rival Horn-of-Africa neighbour, Ethiopia. The announcement came a day after the United Nations Security Council gave Ethiopia and Eritrea until the end of the month to ease the situation.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday lashed out at world media coverage of the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme, accusing news organisations of deliberately distorting the issue. "The world media empire sees it as expedient to say Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, while the propagators know it is a lie," state television quoted the all-powerful leader as saying.
Police have found the decomposing bodies of 13 people who drowned in the Limpopo River while apparently trying to cross from Zimbabwe into neighbouring South Africa earlier this year, state media reported on Tuesday. It was not clear if those found were part of a larger group who were reported to have drowned in the flood waters of the Limpopo in January.
Tom Hanks and the other stars of The Da Vinci Code were to arrive in Cannes on Tuesday ahead of an exclusive preview screening of the movie version of the bestselling novel by Dan Brown. This was to effectively raise the curtain on the Cannes film festival a day early this year.
Thousands of striking security guards smashed car and shop windows in central Cape Town on Tuesday morning while marching along Plein Street to present a memorandum to Parliament. About 5Â 000 protesters marched along Plein Street, many of them armed with steel pipes and wooden sticks.
Typhoon Chanchu barrelled towards Hong Kong and southern China on Tuesday after claiming at least 41 lives in the Philippines and becoming the strongest storm on record to enter the South China sea in May. In Hong Kong, officials have cautioned people to take precautions against strong winds and flooding.
The Tour d’Afrique, the world’s toughest cycling race, which stretches from Cairo to Cape Town and covers 10 African countries over a distance of 12Â 000km, crossed the official finish line on Saturday in Cape Town. Sixty-three intrepid cyclists representing 12 countries rode into the V&A Waterfront after a gruelling 96 days of cycling.
Zimbabwe’s agriculture minister has predicted that the country will harvest its total annual requirement of 1,8-million tonnes of maize, contradicting aid agencies who believe that well below that amount will be reaped, reports said on Tuesday. Joseph Made told a Parliamentary portfolio committee that this year’s harvest would ”significantly improve” .