President Thabo Mbeki on Friday accused the countries of the North of having the wherewithal, but lacking sufficient will to help end poverty in Africa. He said recent events in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan coast have brought into sharp international focus the fact that Spain is facing a new invasion from the South.
Nigeria’s anti-graft agency said on Friday it has returned ,5-million to a Chinese old woman who was victim of an advance fee fraud perpetrated over a five-year period. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said in a statement the money was handed back to 86-year-old Juliana Ching in Hong Kong on September 26, 2005 after it was recovered from a criminal gang.
There was ”bewilderment and disbelief” when Mail & Guardian cartoonist Zapiro, alias Jonathan Shapiro, heard that he had been chosen as this year’s principal Prince Claus laureate in The Netherlands, with prize money of €100 000 (almost R800 000).
Comedian Marc Lottering plans to become a walking, talking condom dispenser, to ”encourage all Capetonians to protect themselves and to survive”, he said in a statement announcing the launch of an innovative nationwide HIV/Aids pledge campaign this weekend. Pledges will be not for money, but rather for action.
Problems between the Scorpions and the police are among the inevitable challenges of managing a society’s law enforcement, the Institute of Security Studies told the Khampepe Commission on Friday. The commission entered its fifth day of public hearings into the future of the Scorpions, which operates as an elite crime-busting unit.
The massive HIV/Aids campaigns that South African society is constantly bombarded with has no effect on reducing the pandemic’s prevalence rate. This is according to Warren Parker, a researcher and director of the Johannesburg-based Centre for Aids, who was addressing the Gauteng Aids conference in Midrand on Friday morning.
The tremors from Anton Oliver’s controversial biography continued on Friday with ex-coach Laurie Mains accusing the former All Black captain of dumping on his teammates. Oliver described the tensions in the Super 12 Otago Highlander team coached by Mains, saying there would have been a player revolt if the ”manipulative” and ”petty” Mains had not left at the end of the 2003 season.
The United States Congress held an unprecedented hearing on Thursday on India’s Dalits, once known as the ”untouchables,” highlighting what it calls a key human rights issue in the world’s largest democracy. About 200-million of India’s estimated population of a billion people are Dalits, occupying the bottom rung in Hinduism’s 2 500-year-old caste system.
Young, clean-cut North Korean guards keep alert as South Koreans scramble up Mount Kumgang, a craggy tourist enclave inside the Stalinist state. They seem happy to welcome their richer brothers and sisters from capitalist South Korea to North Korea’s only tourist resort, known as Diamond Mountain in English.
Merck opened its defence on Thursday in the second product liability trial over its arthritis medicine, countering claims that it did not study whether Vioxx might cause more heart ailments than other pain relievers. Merck researcher Dr Briggs Morrison told jurors the company conducted several studies of Vioxx before putting it on the market in May 1999, each concluding that Vioxx posed no threats to heart health.