The race for the 2012 Summer Games moves to Africa this week, with the five bid cities taking their campaign to Ghana in the last major Olympic gathering before next month’s IOC vote in Singapore. Each city will be given 10-15 minutes on Friday to make formal presentations to the body, which represents 53 countries.
A 74-year-old woman accidentally burned her life savings of 4Â 000 euros because she forgot that the money was hidden in an oven, the daily Jutarnji List reported on Friday. The woman, identified as Dusanka, started a fire to prepare a meal, but forgot that her money was in the oven.
Combative mining magnate Roger Kebble has taken on Bobby Godsell and AngloGold Ashanti as well as the Department of Water and Forestry over water pumping obligations in the Stilfontein basin. Kebble said he and his co-directors are willing to step down from control of the dormant mining company in favour of new appointees nominated by Godsell.
Johannesburg police arrested 203 people in a swoop on Hillbrow which started on Thursday afternoon and ended in the early hours of Friday. Inspector Kriban Naidoo said an ”enormous” number of people were arrested for drunken driving. ”It is no compensation that it was a holiday,” he said.
Police in central Zimbabwe have begun evicting people who settled on former white-owned farms without government permission as part of a countrywide ”clean-up” campaign. Hundreds of white farmers were evicted at the height of the controversial land reform programme when their farms were taken over by militant war veterans.
A cautious Tiger Woods withstood a first round test of patience at the US Open, the Masters champion firing a par 70 on Thursday to stay in contention at the year’s second major tournament. ”I was as patient as possible, just kept hanging in there, kept grinding,” Woods said.
This time last year, the only person who had any faith in the Springboks was Jake White. How little has changed in a year. Then his team — after a poor Super 12, Kamp Staaldraad and the resignations of coach and captain — was written off against the Irish.
Cambodian officials on Friday were interrogating four men who took dozens of mostly foreign nursery school pupils hostage at an international school near the famed Angkor Wat temples and allegedly killed a 2-year-old Canadian boy. Dozens of other children — from as many as 15 countries — managed to hide or scramble from the grounds.
A community organisation has lodged a formal complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority against South African Breweries for what it calls ”disrespectful advertising in poor taste”. Soweto’s June 16 Roots Festival organising committee has issued a statement calling SAB’s Youth Day-oriented Pay Your Respects campaign ”a blatant abuse of drunken profits”.
A row is raging in one of the country’s largest environmental NGOs over the company people keep at the Mail & Guardian’s annual Greening the Future Awards. No sooner had the Botanical Society of South Africa won the prize for environmental best practice disapproving e-mails were circulating among the society’s 16 branches.