President Thabo Mbeki weighed in on Friday in the succession debate raging in South Africa, saying he wants the next president to be a woman. ”As far as I am concerned, the next president of South Africa should be a woman,” Mbeki said. Mbeki named Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka as the first woman deputy president in June after he fired Jacob Zuma from the post in a major corruption scandal.
Irish Republicans on Friday commemorated the 25th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army, who died in jail after a 66-day hunger strike. Sands has come to be considered a martyr by the Republican movement, whose quest for Irish reunification divided the Northern Irish community.
She’s seen owners come and go, but the tortoise in the garden of a five-bedroom Victorian terrace house on sale in Exeter, south-west England, should not be changing address any time soon. Eliza has been living at the Prospect Park property, near the local university, since at least World War II.
A meeting between striking security guards and their employers scheduled for Friday has been postponed to next week, the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) said. A union spokesperson said the meeting had to be postponed because the employers did not arrive.
Is the male equivalent of the chik-lit just an attempt to make publishing dollars out of the baser elements of masculinity? Christopher Turner reports in New York.
Pakistan have hired former South African cricketer Jonty Rhodes to boost their squad’s fielding skills ahead of an important tour of England, officials said on Friday. ”We have finalised the hiring of Rhodes as fielding coach for two weeks and he will be arriving in early June,” Pakistan Cricket Board director Abbas Zaidi told Agence France-Presse.
About 900 companies owe the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (Numsa) about R52-million in workers’ membership fees and bargaining-council fees, Numsa said on Friday. This was revealed in a study conducted by Numsa information technology specialists.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions slammed media reports on Friday, which said the federation had turned on rape accused Jacob Zuma. ”Cosatu has not made a ‘dramatic change of tone’, or ‘turned on’ the deputy president of the African National Congress, as alleged in the article,” said secretary general Zwelinzima Vavi.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said on Friday that Monrovia had no intention, nor is it required, to pay the legal fees of indicted war crimes suspect Charles Taylor. The former Liberian leader is standing trial at the United Nations-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the decade-long Sierra Leone conflict.
Darryl Accone takes a look at the recently published, <i>African Road: New writing from southern africa 2006</i>.