A new book, using hitherto untapped sources, reveals the truth behind the myth of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, writes Michael Yahuda.
Hurricane Katrina pounded storm-wary Florida, killing at least three people, leaving about 1,5-million homes without power and collapsing a Miami highway overpass. Hours after the storm slammed ashore in densely populated southeastern Florida, its eye headed out to the Gulf of Mexico early on Friday, but howling winds and pounding rain still battered Miami.
Trade-union opposition is believed to have thrown a spanner in the works of an ambitious Public Investment Corporation (PIC) plan to transfer the remaining 3,3% of Telkom it was warehousing to 1,5-million government employees, <i>Business Day</i> reported on Friday. The PIC bought 15,1% of Telkom from the overseas Thintana group last year.
World number two platinum-miner Impala Platinum (Implats) on Friday reported a 9,9% increase in basic headline earnings per share for the year to June 2005 of 4 325 cents, from 3 924 cents in the group’s 2004 year. The group declared a final dividend per share of 1 800 cents.
The Springboks will play their final match of the 2005 Tri-Nations against New Zealand on Saturday. A win will give them back-to-back titles in the competition, something only achieved previously by their opponents. Defeat will almost certainly mean second place in the log, for no one in their right mind believes that in the current circumstances Australia can win in New Zealand a week later.
Failed brakes apparently caused the school bus accident that claimed the lives of three pupils and the driver in Cape Town on Thursday, education authorities said. About 40 pupils were injured when the bus overturned in Kloofnek road in Cape Town, the provincial education department said in a statement.
Seventeen people including many children died and about 30 were injured early on Friday when a blaze ripped through a dilapidated apartment building in Paris occupied by African families. The origin of one of the worst blazes in post-war Paris was not known, but a criminal investigation is under way. The fire was a reminder of a blaze on April 15 this year in the central Opera district in which 24 people, also immigrants, perished in a hotel.
A 50-year-old tree tumbled across a road in Newlands, Cape Town, on Friday as gale-force winds, driving rain and bitter cold hit the city in the early hours of the morning. The Elsieskraal River flowing through Pinelands had apparently burst its banks, but there was no major flooding reported so far, said senior traffic officer Lyndon Herbert.
Love in Action International stands on a bluff in north Memphis, the steep roof of the ministry’s angular modernist church offering itself as a beacon of hope for the world’s reluctant homosexuals. That should include every gay man and lesbian on the planet, according to the Reverend John Smid, the head of this evangelical group, whose mission is to take gays and straighten them out.
Iraq’s leaders missed another deadline for a new Constitution on Thursday night when the ruling Shia and Kurdish coalition failed to win Sunni Arab support for the proposed draft. A one-day extension was announced minutes after the midnight deadline but there was little sign that last-ditch talks on Friday would bridge divisions between the main ethnic and sectarian groups.