Rules banning visitors to the Kruger National Park from hanging out of their vehicle windows are there to protect them, an official said on Wednesday after a motorist complained about being fined. Ermelo property valuer Neil Bornman was fined R500 by a park official who caught his daughter ”protruding” from the family minibus.
The government is being asked to consider a new deal for South Africa’s 1Â 240 public libraries, currently floundering in the no-man’s-land of an ”unfunded mandate”, meaning provinces do not get money from the national government to meet this responsibility, according to the head of the Centre for the Book.
At least 23 people were killed and 20 injured when a bus and tractor-trailer collided near Kenya’s southern port of Mombasa, police and hospital officials said on Tuesday. The vehicles, which were travelling in the same direction along the main road from Nairobi to Mombasa, crashed at around 4am.
A Ugandan lawmaker said on Wednesday he would reward girls from his central constituency with university scholarships if they leave high school able to prove their virginity. Sulaiman Madada said the scheme aimed to promote morality and that successful scholarship applicants would have to submit to a gynaecological exam to demonstrate their chastity.
Worldwide PC sales grew by about 17% in the second quarter of the year as falling prices spiked demand in Asia and Latin America, research firm IDC said on Tuesday. Total PC shipments during the second quarter grew to 46,57-million compared with 39,94-million in the same period a year earlier, IDC said.
”iNantsoke [there you are],” exclaimed Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg on Wednesday as he cut his huge white birthday cake at the children’s party.
Dangerously gathering strength, Hurricane Emily lumbered toward the shores of Mexico’s Tamaulipas state on Wednesday. Meanwhile, one person was reported dead and several missing on Wednesday as China grappled with the havoc left by Typhoon Haitang, whose winds and rain forced one million people from their homes.
As the Aids pandemic cuts a deadly swathe across Southern Africa, a multidisciplinary research team is looking at developing intervention strategies to care for affected children and orphans. The five-year, donor-funded project is concentrating its work on Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe at first.
Trade union Solidarity on Wednesday expressed its misgivings about the course of the Department of Labour investigation into the cause of the Sasol Unit 24 explosion last September. Solidarity said in a statement that it is also concerned "that lego-technical procedures may affect the legitimate outcome of the investigation".
The new Harry Potter book broke all known and independently validated South African book-sales records on the first day it went on sale in the country, a book-sales tracker company said on Wednesday. Harry Potter fans in Britain and the United States snapped up almost nine million copies in the book’s first 24 hours on sale.