George Weah has been on the campaign trail for weeks, and the retired footballer who would be president of war-ravaged Liberia looks exhausted. The convoy of four-wheel-drive cars tells the story of the journey. After setting out from the capital Monrovia last Friday with 32 vehicles, his campaign team bumped back towards the city on Friday in just five mud-spattered cars.
A massive earthquake is feared to have killed more than 1 000 people in Pakistan on Saturday, said chief military spokesperson Major General Shaukat Sultan. ”The death toll could be more than 1 000. There could be massive casualties but we do not have exact numbers,” Sultan said from the capital Islamabad.
About 1 400 people were killed by a mudslide in the Guatemalan highland village of Panabaj that had been triggered by torrential rains from Hurricane Stan, Reuters reported on Saturday. The latest figure would bring to almost 2 000 the total number of people killed by the storm.
An earthquake measuring at least 7,6 on the Richter scale caused massive devastation on Saturday across a swathe of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. The confirmed death toll in the earthquake has passed 1 000, officials said. In Pakistan’s North West Frontier province alone, the toll is above 550.
The Timbuktu manuscripts, which went on show in Johannesburg this week, would be the last place you’d expect to find humour, pathos and sweeping tales of forbidden love. Academics and historians have expressed joy that the rare collection of 25 000 books, dating back as early as the 13th century ”reflects how we deal with existential issues of the human condition”.
In the wake of the Constitutional Court judgement on the legitimacy of pricing controls in the pharmaceutical industry, the Mail &Guradian spoke to pharmacists in the greater Johannesburg area to get their responses to the the decision and what it means for them.
When President Thabo Mbeki visits the Vaal region next week, he will find the area in a state of collapse, with politicians turning on each other, Iscor having shed 20Â 000 jobs and residents threatening a repeat of the 1984 Lekoa/Vaal uprising against their councillors.
I had just passed the baroque gilt gates of ”Chez Guevara”, the summer residence of a Marxist of the 1970s who had recently discovered the joys of broad-based empowerment, when I realised I was being tailed. The metallic new model Mini Cooper hung back at a safe following distance, its driver almost buried under enormous bags of laundry.
On July 22 this year a young Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, was killed by police guarding the Stockwell underground station in London. At first the killing was justified by the police who said De Menezes had been wearing a bulky anorak, had refused to stop when challenged for questioning, had leapt over a barrier and run down into the underground station.
Two organisations came out against a merger of the Scorpions and the police in oral submissions at the Khampepe commission in Pretoria on Friday. The Foundation for Human Rights held that incorporating the Scorpions into the police service would be detrimental to South Africa’s ability to combat crime.