Sixty-two alleged mercenaries are expected back in South Africa by noon on Thursday after their release from a Zimbabwean jail, South African Broadcasting Corporation news reported. Their lawyer, Alwyn Griebenow, said the men would leave a remand prison in Harare by 6am for the Beit Bridge border post near Musina in Limpopo.
The former child star Macaulay Culkin on Wednesday denied that Michael Jackson had ever molested him, and dismissed the current charges against the pop singer as ”absolutely ridiculous”. For the first time, Culkin, a defence witness at Jackson’s California trial on child molestation charges, admitted that as a child he had shared a bed with the 46-year-old singer on several occasions.
The number of suicide attacks in Iraq has reached a record high, with more than 67 insurgents blowing themselves up in the month of April alone. New figures show that of the 135 car bombings that month, which took hundreds of lives and inflicted thousands of injuries, more than half were suicide missions.
We were in the tourism Indaba media centre when a hack turned to a veteran journalist from East London’s <i>Daily Dispatch</i> and asked: "So what’s East London’s major tourism offering?" "Sun, sand and adventure," was the reply, followed by a list of things to do. "You really should come and have a look," the East London journalist insisted.
The last thing we expected on the back-roads of Langkawi was a traffic jam. But there we were, marooned behind a rickety old Datsun pick-up, inhaling the primeval pungency of its cargo of fruit as they warmed in the midday sun. The old man at the wheel was patiently waiting on a monitor lizard — four feet of shimmering silver from tail to flickering tongue — to amble across the road.
Threatened legislation meant to discourage whistle-blowing or to punish those who release information that causes public panic is unlikely to pass muster, lawyers say. But the media has reason to be afraid of the shoot-the-messenger thinking behind the concept.
One of the government’s pressing dilemmas is what to do about South Africa’s growing energy demands, given that the country’s power generation capacity will peak in two years’ time. The authorities have undertaken to supply 80% of households with electricity by 2014, and abundant cheap energy is a prerequisite for economic progress. Yet none of the options is entirely unproblematic.
It’s all terribly exciting: enough cash to finance half of the current account deficit, the biggest foreign investment of the post-apartheid era, and a seismic jolt for the cosy cartel upon which our banking system reposes. Barclays’s bid for Absa, ask almost anyone, is a R33 billion "vote of confidence" from the great raptorial beasts of the global financial system.
In July 2003 when United States President George W Bush was asked about the growing number of attacks by insurgents in Iraq, he said: ”Bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation.” That assertion was being questioned again this week after a fresh wave of suicide bombings that has killed nearly 400 people in the past fortnight.
It seems the coffers of the Western Cape government haven’t been entirely flattened by the publicly funded drol-spoeging contest between Premier Ebrahim Rasool and pretender to his throne, Mcebisi Skwatsha. No, there’s just enough in the kitty to launch an ad campaign intended to make the world think differently about the province that launched the Great Trek, among other things.