Elisabeth Anderson is passionate about books and reading, which is perhaps no more than one would expect from the head of Cape Town’s Centre for the Book. But she also burns with an almost missionary zeal to infuse this passion into others. And if there is for this champion of the written word a force of darkness that has to be beaten back, it is South Africa’s massive illiteracy rate.
Hollywood actor Wesley Snipes is an ”undesirable person” and his fake South African passport has been confiscated, the Department of Home Affairs said on Wednesday. Spokesperson Nkosana Sibuyi said Snipes slipped into the country undetected on May 23 through the Johannesburg International airport.
About 161 people were injured when two Metrorail trains collided in Soweto on Wednesday evening, Johannesburg Emergency Services spokesperson Malcolm Midgley said. A train ploughed into a stationary train at Merafe station in Naledi following a power failure.
Bernard Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, was sentenced on Wednesday to 25 years in prison for his role in the -billion fraud that drove the once high-flying American company into the largest bankruptcy in corporate history.
Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, on Wednesday ordered ”a relentless attack” on the leadership of Islamic Jihad following Tuesday’s suicide bombing in the Israeli seaside town of Netanya, which killed two women and two teenage girls.
Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay degraded and abused a key prisoner, forcing him to wear a bra and threatening him with a dog, military investigators claimed on Wednesday. He was also told by interrogators he was a homosexual, forced to dance with a male interrogator, and told his mother and sister were whores.
Since Lemmer discovered that he is married to Mrs Glenda Sherman of Nutcracker Grove, and that he has been deceased since August 1986, he’s been waiting to see if any public apology was going to be issued by the improbably inept Department of Home Affairs. So it was gratifying this week to see the department take time off from its busy schedule to ask forgiveness in the television advert.
Like an earthquake, the London bombings have brought an aftershock — and it came this week. The police announcement that the explosions on July 7 on the underground and on the Number 30 bus were, apparently, the work of British suicide bombers is the most shocking news to come since the attacks themselves. It is also the bleakest possible development.
The controversial Operation Murambatsvina and President Thabo Mbeki’s role in the Zimbabwean crisis has heightened divisions within Zimbabwe’s two major political parties, and has caused ructions within the diaspora. Opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai is taking strain for ”betraying” the party by meeting Mbeki in Pretoria.
Click on image for full-size view.