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/ 29 September 2005
Mary Lee Settle, novelist and founder of the Pen/Faulkner award for fiction, has died from lung cancer. She was 87. Settle died on Tuesday at her home in Ivy, said Jessica Neely, executive director of the Washington, DC-based Pen/Faulkner award. Settle founded the annual award in 1981 to honour the best work of fiction by an American author.
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/ 29 September 2005
Most frogs settle for lily pads. Kermit the Frog has hopped on to a United States postage stamp. The green leader of the beloved Muppets troupe was on hand on Wednesday for a first-day issue ceremony featuring 11 postage stamps honouring the Muppets and late creator Jim Henson.
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/ 29 September 2005
Zimbabwe announced it was moving back into the steam age on Wednesday by recommissioning 10 coal-fired locomotives to cope with the country’s economic crisis. Further indications of shortages came from hospitals, which are turning away patients because they do not have basic medicines and surgical equipment.
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/ 29 September 2005
The president of the United States is dying. His female vice-president is under pressure to resign. Even as her communications director writes her resignation speech, one of her male aides begs her to reconsider. ”A female president,” he says. ”Can’t you smell the history?”
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/ 29 September 2005
United States President George Bush suffered a significant blow to his already problematic second presidential term when a key Republican, Tom DeLay, majority leader in the House of Representatives, was indicted by a grand jury on Wednesday on a single conspiracy charge related to political fund-raising.
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/ 29 September 2005
The Nobel Literature Prize has for decades gone to fiction writers and poets, but just days before this year’s winner is revealed, some say the prestigious prize could be awarded within a different genre altogether. Despite the list of usual suspects, the Swedish Academy might just have a surprise in store this year.
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/ 29 September 2005
The Benedict Vilakazi rape case on Wednesday saw his 15-year-old accuser’s innocence brought into question as it was shown she may have deceived her family and lied about her age. Defence counsel Ike Motloung said the girl’s guardians at the time had been ”led up the garden path to believe she was a virgin” when she was not.
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/ 29 September 2005
A witness to an alleged assault on farmworker Nelson Chisale, who was fed to lions, will be called back to the stand in the lion murder trial in the Phalaborwa Circuit Court on Thursday to be cross-examined on his evidence by counsel for his former employer, Mark Scott-Crossley.
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/ 29 September 2005
Global warming in the Arctic could be soaring out of control, scientists warned on Wednesday as new figures revealed that melting of sea ice in the region has accelerated to record levels. Experts at the United States National Snow and Data Centre in Colorado fear the region is locked into a destructive melting cycle.
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/ 29 September 2005
South African information and communications technology company Allied Technologies (Altech) posted a 15,3% rise in headline earnings per share to 181 cents for the six-month period ended August this year, from 157 cents reported a year earlier. Revenue jumped by 11% to R2,933-billion.