The former Philippine president Joseph Estrada took the stand in his trial for embezzling state funds on Wednesday, insisting he had been framed and had not taken kickbacks while in office. ”These are trumped-up charges, a frame-up,” Estrada (68) said, giving evidence for the first time in four and a half years.
A Florida schoolteacher who admitted sleeping with her 14-year-old pupil will escape punishment after a judge rejected a plea deal that would have given her 10 years of house arrest and probation. The state attorney Richard Ridgway dropped molestation charges against Debra Lafave after a Marion county superior court judge refused to accept a deal that would have removed the need for the boy to give evidence.
For its CeBIT trade show press conference this month, Microsoft said it had scheduled 30 seconds for its Ultra Mobile PC announcement, known as Origami. The company didn’t know that Digital Kitchen had left an old concept video online, nor that bloggers would find it. The result was that the project attracted far more hype than intended — and, naturally, failed to live up to it.
The World Golf Hall of Fame on Thursday unveiled a special exhibit, Gary Player: A Global Journey, that tells the story of the world’s most-travelled athlete and explores the impact he has had on the game and beyond. ”I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but after walking through the exhibit I was deeply moved,” said Player.
Announcing nine members of her executive mayoral committee on Thursday, the Democratic Alliance’s Helen Zille said the DA still had a vacancy for the Independent Democrats, which rejected a revised offer to join the multiparty government of the city of Cape Town.
South Africa recorded its largest recorded capital inflow in 2005, the South African Reserve Bank said in its quarterly bulletin released on Thursday. ”Sound macroeconomic policies in South Africa and continued positive investor sentiment towards emerging markets in general gave rise to sizeable capital inflows in the country in 2005,” the bank said.
Treating mothers for depression can mean long-term happiness for their children, according to a study published on Tuesday. Depression is known to be passed on genetically, but it can also be affected by the environment in which a child is raised, according to authors of an article published by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The head of the United Nations’s probe into illegal kickbacks paid to Iraq under the oil-for-food programme found the Australian government initially uncooperative and reticent to provide information. The Australian panel examining the discredited programme was told that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer had at first prevented the UN from interviewing government officials over the scandal.
After more than three-quarters of a century working for public transit agencies, a bus maintenance worker will retire on Tuesday on his 100th birthday. For decades, Arthur Winston reported to work at a bus yard at the crack of dawn. By 6am he would be supervising a crew of workers as they cleaned and refueled the region’s bus fleet.
Space tourism has caught the imagination of United States business leaders, some of whom already have plans to serve what they say may be a multibillion-dollar industry in a couple of decades. ”Space tourism will be a significant portion of the overall travel and tourism industry over the next 20 to 25 years,” said Eric Anderson, chief executive of Space Adventures.