The Guardian, voice of Britain’s middle-class liberals, added its voice on Monday to calls for Prime Minister Tony Blair to step down sooner rather than later, amid a scandal over financing for his Labour Party. ”He should go this year,” the paper said in an editorial, ideally before the end of September, when Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown should take his place.”
The British Museum’s first exhibition in China has left many Chinese wondering where their own country’s priceless artefacts in the collection from the world’s oldest museum have gone. ”Why are there no Chinese artefacts and [who] do the objects really belong to?” asked the official Xinhua news agency on Monday.
Humphrey, the cat who shared 10 Downing Street with two British prime ministers but was evicted by current resident Tony Blair, has died. He was aged about 18. Blair’s office said late on Sunday that Humphrey died last week at the home of a civil servant who had adopted him.
Pietermaritzburg is heading in the same direction as Cape Town with the possibility of ongoing power failures — only this time it is not Eskom to blame, but the city’s own internal system, the Witness website reported on Monday. The KwaZulu-Natal provincial capital has an electricity department ”with hardly any electricians”.
Dimension Data, a global IT solutions and services provider, has been praised by the Botswana government for its Citizen Empowerment Partnership initiative with Principal Investments, a group of local Botswana business persons who acquired a 49% equity stake in Dimension Data Botswana earlier this year.
Stephen Fleming led New Zealand to an emphatic 10-wicket victory over the West Indies on the fourth day of the second cricket Test, to wrap up the series 2-0 with a game to spare in Wellington on Monday. In terms of overs bowled, the win was achieved in just three days of cricket with only foul weather forcing play into the fourth day.
A three-week long trial that has swung from the religious mysteries in The Da Vinci Code to the more humdrum world of copyright law approaches its climax in a British court on Monday. Lawyers for Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors who claim novelist Dan Brown ”appropriated the architecture” of their non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, are to begin their closing arguments.
The mystery of the watered pitch at Newlands continues, but former South African and Transvaal opening batsman Jimmy Cook said on Monday that it was the prerogative of the home side to prepare pitches that suited them. ”It’s not clear whether South Africa asked for the pitch to be watered, but apparently it looked very dry when they arrived in Cape Town,” he said.
International financial- and risk-services group Alexander Forbes (AFB) denied reports on Monday that it was the subject of an investigation by the Financial Services Board (FSB) into the alleged skimming of pension fund surpluses. The group said that since 2000 the FSB has been conducting an investigation.
The Democratic Alliance’s Helen Zille, Cape Town’s new mayor, answers 10 tough questions.