A French amateur psychic’s powers of prediction were under sharp scrutiny after his crystal ball started an inferno that burnt out his flat, a British newspaper reported on Friday. The fortune-telling device caused a fire that destroyed two other flats and rendered several more uninhabitable, <i>The Times</i> said.
Known for his trademark cap and greying moustache, Ibrahim Ferrer who achieved fame as the singer of the Buena Vista Social Club, died last Saturday in Havana at the age of 78, writes David Teather.
The JSE Securities Exchange (JSE) reached another record high on Friday, with gold stocks delivering a particularly strong performance due to the higher bullion price and the end of the nationwide strike in the gold-mining industry. The bourse’s strength came in defiance of a strong rand.
Owen King may share his father’s liberal politics and fervent support for the Boston Red Sox, but the two break ranks when it comes to ghouls, vampires and other denizens of the dark side. There’s no hint of the supernatural in King’s debut novella and short stories.
Crude oil prices on Friday rose to new highs, climbing past a barrel, as reports of new United States refinery outages rekindled fears that gasoline supplies in the world’s biggest consumer would struggle to meet rising demand. Analysts said gasoline demand, currently at its peak in the United States, was driving crude’s gains.
Youth representatives from across Africa will meet next week in Morocco to discuss the continent’s most pressing problems, including HIV/Aids, poverty, the environment and the technology gap. ”We bring the young together and we let them loose, let them work together to solve these problems,” said Djibril Diallo, chairperson of the Pan-African Youth Leadership Summit.
The death toll in an epidemic of ”bloody diarrhoea” in the central region of the Democratic Republic of Congo has risen to 23, a health official said on Thursday. The epidemic broke out on July 29 at Kabongola, about 240km from Kindu, the main city of the central Maniema province.
Anger over Indonesia’s inability to douse forest fires that have smothered parts of Malaysia with a dangerous haze mounted on Friday as the crisis worsened in the capital, Kuala Lumpur. The opposition Democratic Action Party held a protest at the Indonesian embassy in pollution-shrouded Kuala Lumpur.
The African National Congress has engaged in a series of "winks and nudges" in dealing with the human rights abuses and autocratic behaviour of President Robert Mugabe, says Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon. "Mugabe’s ‘cocking a snook’ or giving a ‘two’s-up’ to whiteys and the West seems to appeal to a sizeable constituency in the ANC," he said.
Can foreigners make credible films about South Africa? And, where does one draw the line between fiction and documentary, between emphasising the aesthetic aspect of film or the political, asks Wilhelm Snyman.