South African government negotiators played a central role in charting a future for reducing climate change at the giant United Nations conference in Montreal recently. Alf Wills, leader of the 50-strong South African delegation, presided over a central committee trying to ensure a way forward for the Kyoto Protocol and its attempts to limit harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

Italian porn stars were up in arms on Thursday over plans by Silvio Berlusconi’s government to introduce a tax on their work. The proceeds from the proposed new ”porn tax” would go towards paying for working mothers to afford baby-sitters.

It was once called Boxing Day. Now Bafana Bafana coach Ted Dumitru’s plan to start preparations for the African Nations Cup on the day after Christmas has received a shuddering, if not decisive knock-out blow from Fifa.

Visitors to the Abu Aishe family in the heart of the biblical and bitterly-disputed city of Hebron either require an army escort to the front of the steel mesh cage protecting the three-storey home or risk assault by a barrage of stones, rotting food and shouts of ”Death to Arabs” from the neighbours.

The wife of a passenger shot dead after apparently claiming he was carrying a bomb on a plane desperately tried to tell air marshals her husband was mentally ill and had not taken his medication before they opened fire, killing him. ”She was chasing after him,” Alan Tirpak, another passenger on board, told CNN.

South Africa’s foreign affairs department is ”quite optimistic” of a breakthrough in negotiations with Equatorial Guinea for the release of two South African crewmen being held there against their will. ”Our director-general has emphasised the need to bring them back home as soon as possible,” said a foreign affairs spokesperson.