It is really a bit of minnow, this fossil fish of which a team of British and South African scientists have now found a dozen or so examples, embedded in 450-million year old Ordovician shale in a roadside quarry in the Cederberg. Still, this fish, has put the Cederberg ”Soom” fossil site firmly on the map.
A racing pigeon belonging to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II has been missing for more than a month ahead of a big race, a spokesperson said on Friday. Pigeon-fanciers feared the young bird may be flocking about with common pigeons — or, worse, have been eaten by a sparrowhawk.
Burundi’s new President, Pierre Nkurunziza, was sworn in Bujumbura on Friday as the country’s first elected leader after 12 years of war at a ceremony attended by several other African heads of state. The swearing-in also marked the end of an extended four-year transitional period that ushered in democratic rule in Burundi.
Homeopathic treatment is no more effective than a placebo, the dummy substance used in medical trials, according to a study appearing in Saturday’s issue of The Lancet, the British medical weekly. That is the conclusion of a team of doctors in Britain and Switzerland, who reviewed a mountain of published evidence.
<a href="http://www.mg.co.za/specialreport.aspx?area=zuma_report"><img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/243078/zuma.jpg" align=left border=0></a>President Thabo Mbeki has bluntly given his support to a Congress of South African Trade Union campaign to protect former deputy president Jacob Zuma, and pledged on Friday to unite "the entirely of our movement in a determined offensive" to defeat any conspiracy to discredit him.
Oil prices slipped on Friday, a day after its record-setting session, as Hurricane Katrina spared refineries in the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall on Florida’s coast, easing fears of supply disruptions for the time being. However, the world’s limited excess capacity to offset any unscheduled outages continues to be at the pricing forefront.
Residents of flood-stricken parts of Switzerland continued to suffer on Friday from the aftermath of a weeklong crisis that left at least six people dead or missing. About 400 inhabitants of the town of Brienz and a nearby village were evacuated overnight amid fears of a further landslide.
The Inkatha Freedom Party did not breach election regulations by handing out stationery with its logo to schools in the Zululand region, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) said on Friday. ”What is at stake is whether the party was in breach of the Department of Education’s regulations and policies,” said the IEC.
The African Christian Democratic Party is shocked by suggestions from the tripartite alliance that the state must fund axed deputy president Jacob Zuma’s legal costs for his corruption case. The alliance urged Zuma’s lawyer on Thursday to ask the state to fund his legal costs.
Australia is about to sever a yet another historical link with Britain. It will abandon Greenwich Mean Time and adopt a new national standard next week, based on the atomic clock. ”Really, GMT is just a little bit outmoded,” said Richard Britain of Australia’s National Measurement Institute.