South Africa’s Roland Schoeman won his third gold medal — and South Africa’s eighth gold — at the Commonwealth Games with victory in the men’s 50m freestyle final on Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, South Africa’s Elizna Naude won the women’s discus title and shooter Diane Swanton won gold in the women’s trap title.
The US Supreme Court is due to hear arguments in a case today that could overturn thousands of controversial patents, after a lower court ruled that doctors could infringe a drug company’s ownership rights ”merely by thinking” about the relationship between two chemicals in the human body.
Sarcelles, a northern Paris suburb that is home to 20 000 Jews — the highest concentration of any suburb in France — has found itself at the centre of a wave of national soul-searching about the country’s recurring problem of anti-Semitism. Last month, a Jewish telephone salesman, Ilan Halimi, was tortured to death.
Looking for somewhere quiet? Bridgeville might be just the place. The town boasts no shops, no cafés or restaurants, one two-lane road and very few people. And it’s for sale. The entire 34ha town, set amid the imposing redwoods of northern California, is to be sold on the online auction site eBay. Bids are invited, starting at ,75-million.
A powerful new militia dubbed ”the Pakistani Taliban” has effectively seized control of swathes of the country’s northern tribal areas in recent months, triggering alarm in Islamabad and marking a big setback in the United States’s ”war on terror”. The militants are strongest in North and South Waziristan.
Traditional healers in Zimbabwe’s southern Masvingo province have called on the government to allow them to visit public hospitals to administer herbs to patients who are otherwise not getting much help from the state institutions because of a shortage of medicines.
A KwaZulu-Natal provincial minister, Narend Singh, has been granted 10 days’ leave after reports of a sex DVD — in which he was shown — appeared in weekend newspapers. Singh’s spokesperson Keshika Singh said on Monday he had requested a leave of absence from KwaZulu-Natal Premier S’bu Ndebele.
Eskom has rejected a claim by the trade union Solidarity that it turned down a coloured man for a job because he was ”too white” to benefit from the company’s affirmative-action programme. Eskom spokesperson Fani Zulu said on Monday that Leon Christiaans was never offered the position in question.
The Bloemfontein Women’s Memorial should also reflect the history of black women and children, the African National Congress Women’s League said on Monday. The sandstone obelisk pays tribute to women and children who died in British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer South African War.
South Africa’s Constitution runs the risk of being downgraded to a mere Act of Parliament, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Tuesday. In his Human Rights Day message, Leon said the Constitution has been subjected to a slew of amendments that undermine its vitality and centrality.