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/ 27 September 2005
French police are investigating the suicide of two teenage girls who tied themselves together and leapt from the 17th storey of a tower block while their horrified boyfriends watched. The girls, named only as Marion and Virginie, had apparently carefully prepared their deaths.
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/ 27 September 2005
Perched among the highlands of western Cameroon, Lake Nyos is a scene of breathtaking beauty. But the picture is deceptive. A detailed study reveals that without emergency measures, the lake could release a lethal cloud of carbon dioxide, capable of wiping out entire communities around its shores.
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/ 27 September 2005
Hurricane Rita’s path of devastation along the Texas-Louisiana coast became shockingly clear on Monday, as rescuers pulled stranded bayou residents out on skiffs and army helicopters searched for thousands of cattle feared drowned. In Terrebonne Parish, the count of severely damaged or destroyed homes stood at nearly 9Â 900.
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/ 27 September 2005
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Monday narrowly survived an attempt to force an early leadership election in the ruling Likud party, in retaliation for his demolition of Jewish settlements in Gaza, after warning that the party would be ”committing political suicide”.
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/ 27 September 2005
A man was killed when a tree fell on top of him during high winds on Monday night at Zevenfontein informal settlement, north of Johannesburg. Monday night also saw large areas of Gauteng plunged into darkness and roofs flying off houses. Johannesburg emergency services received about 1 500 emergency calls.
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/ 27 September 2005
Opposition politics in South Africa is now in real crisis. Not only has the opposition’s share of the vote been going steadily down election-on-election since 1994, but the minority parties appear determined to weaken themselves further by self-induced fragmentation — a trend sharply accentuated by the apparently irresistible charms of the recent floor-crossing period.
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/ 27 September 2005
Figures released by Statistics South Africa show that "expanded unemployment" stood at 8,1-million people in South Africa by March this year — compared to 6,4-million in September 2000. Things have become much worse on the unemployment front, the Democratic Alliance said in reaction.
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/ 27 September 2005
Typhoon Damrey on Tuesday barrelled into the east coast of Vietnam, where officials evacuated 300 000 people after the storm tore a path of destruction through neighbouring China. The powerful storm, packing winds of more than 100kph, left at least nine people dead in south-west China on Monday.
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/ 27 September 2005
The Kruger National Park wants to shoot up to 6 000 elephants as part of a national culling programme that could start next winter, the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> has learnt. Thousands of elephants in other state and private reserves around the country will also be culled, if a South African National Parks report on elephant management is endorsed by the public.
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/ 27 September 2005
After 15 years of living in the city, Gcina Mahlatashana says his three months at the new Brickfields residential complex in Newtown has been his best inner-city-living experience yet. "In comparison to the buildings I have experienced living in, this is much better," he says, staring out across the Brickfields car park. The <i>M&G</i> investigates the various options available to those who are keen on inner-city living.