Arsene Wenger hailed Thierry Henry’s decision to stay at Arsenal as more significant for the club’s future than winning the Champions League would have been. Henry signed a new four-year deal at the north London club two days after the Gunners went down 2-1 to Barcelona in the Champions League final.
National police chief Jackie Selebi won’t be engaging in any debate surrounding his call for the demise of the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), said police spokesperson, Director Sally de Beer on Friday. Business Day newspaper on Thursday reported Selebi as saying the directorate had ”outlived its usefulness” and could be dissolved, leaving the police to police themselves.
Talks on the current security guards’ strike deadlocked again on Friday after the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) refused to suspend the strike. Employers want Satawu to call off the violence-wracked strike as a precondition to negotiating, but Satawu has rejected this call.
The Asia-wide death toll from Tropical Storm Chanchu rose to 91 on Friday, with nearly 250 Vietnamese fisherman still missing at sea and 28 reported dead as the tempest moved offshore again after battering southern China. The storm has cut a path of destruction across several countries and territories around the South China Sea.
Bitterly cold weather around the country is likely to result in snow on higher ground, hail and sleet in the interior and rough seas in the Cape, meteorologists said on Friday. The National Forecasting Centre said the central and eastern parts of the country are being invaded by very cold weather.
Since its inception, the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s conspiracy novel, The Da Vinci Code, has been the subject of so much anticipation and controversy, Laura Barton reports.
The world needs a new breed of prosecutor and investigator to deal with the challenges of transnational organised crime, the special adviser to National Director of Public Prosecutions Vusi Pikoli said on Friday. Kalyani Pillay was speaking in Cape Town at a PricewaterhouseCoopers conference on economic crime in Africa.
Vodacom was up and running again on Friday afternoon after subscribers could not make or receive phone calls earlier. ”After extensive investigation Vodacom has identified that incoming data received on interconnecting links from the Cell C network appears to have disrupted the Vodacom network,” Vodacom said.
Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani promised that Tehran would cooperate with United Nations inspectors, in a meeting late on Thursday in Vienna with UN atomic agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei. ”The discussion was that of course Iran is continuing its cooperation with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency],” Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh said.
Nu Metro and SABC Africa have launched a small festival for big ideas, writes Niren Tolsi.