The editor of a new gay and lesbian travel guide to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia said on Thursday he hopes the book will foster more acceptance of homosexuality — which is outlawed in all three conservative South-East Asian nations.
Hundreds of people arrived at the Galeshewe Stadium in Kimberley to attend national Freedom Day celebrations and hear President Thabo Mbeki speak on Thursday. Meanwhile, the ruling party’s behaviour in the Western Cape is a ”direct assault” on the Constitution and its freedoms, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said.
Embarrassed by that tattoo with the name of that former lover? Or those characters in Chinese that you believed meant ”eternal love” but later found out to mean ”penguin hairball”? For those prepared to wait a little longer before going under the needle, help is on the way.
Oil prices eased on Thursday after United States government data showed motor-fuel demand weakening, apparently in response to higher pump prices. The data also showed that domestic inventories of gasoline shrank for the eighth consecutive week, and that may have moderated the selling, analysts said.
South American nations will have to choose whether they want continental unity or individual trade agreements with the United States — but not both, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said on Wednesday. ”You either have one or the other … they’re like oil and water,” Chávez said.
Wildlife authorities said on Wednesday they had been forced to euthanise ”Big Mama”, a giant 52-year-old Nile crocodile that had been a star attraction at a Ugandan zoo for nearly half a century. Keepers at the Uganda Wildlife Education Centre in Entebbe, south of the capital, put down the ailing reptile at the weekend.
This week’s bombings in Sinai are linked to the terror attacks in the peninsula’s resorts of Sharm el-Sheik last year and Taba in 2004, Egyptian Interior Minister Habib el-Adly said on Wednesday. ”The information we have indicates that [the perpetrators] are Sinai Bedouin,” el-Adly told state television.
United States rapper, producer and actor Snoop Dogg will not perform at Thursday’s People’s Celebration concert in Johannesburg after being detained in London following an incident at Heathrow International airport on Wednesday night, radio station 5fm reported.
Mine attacks killed two navy sailors and wounded two commandos in northern Sri Lanka on Thursday in the latest in a barrage of violence that is posing the biggest danger yet to the country’s four-year-old ceasefire. The bloodshed threatens to wreck a 2002 truce that ended two decades of fighting between the government and rebels.
The first feature film to address the events of 9/11 opened in New York on Wednesday, leaving some audience members sobbing and the rest in shocked silence. United 93, by the British director Paul Greengrass, opened the Tribeca Film Festival, and the evening began like any other premiere.