President Robert Mugabe’s human rights record has been condemned for the first time by African leaders, significantly increasing pressure on the Zimbabwean leader to restore the rule of law and stop evicting people from their homes. The unprecedented criticism comes from the African Union’s Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
Firefighters entered their 10th day on Tuesday evening fighting a blaze in the Franschhoek mountains above Dewdale farm. Danie Wilds, fire chief of Cape Winelands district municipality, said crews were still battling the same hot spots that have been their nemeses for the past couple of days.
Why do we bother with sex? I don’t, of course, mean just the physical act. Artificial insemination made that dispensable several centuries ago. We expend a lot of time and energy finding, seducing and mating with our mate, and as a method of making babies it just doesn’t seem to make economic sense. New research backs the idea that sex is a kind of Epsom salts for genomes, purging them of errors.
Samsung’s market value surged past -billion on Wednesday as its stock jumped 5,1%, putting it among Asia’s largest companies by market capitalisation. The value of Samsung’s common stock rose to about 103-trillion won, or -billion, after its share price rose to a record high 699 000 won () on Wednesday.
As King Kong trampled the holiday-season box office last week, Rwanda quietly remembered United States primatologist Dian Fossey, who put the film ape’s inspiration, the mountain gorilla, on the map and most likely saved it from extinction. Fossey’s legacy still looms large in the inhospitable Virunga Mountains where many of the world’s remaining 700 mountain gorillas live.
Five people were killed and eleven injured after clashes between South Africans and foreigners on Wednesday at the Olievenhoutbosch informal settlement south of Pretoria. One person was found dead at the scene and the other four died on the way to hospital.
Legislation nearly 30-years-old that outlaws male-to-male sodomy may appear more a target for gay rights activists than Aids campaigners.
Nasa’s forward-thinking Institute for Advanced Concepts, the organisation that first backed research into space elevators (think of a satellite tethered to Earth by a giant cable) has again made its annual call for revolutionary ideas lurking in the laboratories, or even just in the imagination, of United States space scientists.
As a chemist at one of the United States’s top medical firms, Helen Lee devised a way to screen blood for a common but deadly virus. The day her test hit the market, blood banks clamoured for it, making her bosses -million overnight. A scientist could be forgiven for revelling in the achievement, but Lee and a handful of others were uncomfortable.
Click on image for full-size view.