A cigarette probably saved fisherman Johan Ehlers in a sea tragedy feared to have claimed the lives of 14 of his shipmates. Ehlers was on deck smoking when a Brazilian ship collided with his trawler about 16km off Sardinia Bay in the Eastern Cape, around 1.30am on Sunday.
A beachcomber called police to report a grisly find while walking on Auckland’s Eastern Beach at the weekend — ”what appeared to be a set of severed male genitalia, including penis and testicles”, as the police log recorded it. In fact, the Dominion Post newspaper reported on Monday, the suspected male appendage was found to be a form of marine life.
I have it on pretty good authority (and my sources seldom fail me — since I am one of them myself) that the Senegalese capital of Dakar is giving Johannesburg and Durban a pretty good run for their money when it comes to staging international conferences with an African bent. The rise of the African conference city is now being called the New Nepad Nexus.
Nearly 300 World War II veterans took a salute from South African National Defence Force chief of corporate services Lieutenant General Themba Matanzima on Sunday at a ceremony at the Rand Regiments’ Memorial in Johannesburg. The veterans, wearing their medals with jacket and tie, marched proudly by, to remember the end of the conflict exactly 60 years before.
When Wham! bounced on stage to play the first western pop concert in China, neither the Chinese nor George Michael knew quite how to behave. The 15 000-strong audience in 1985 were unsure how they were supposed to react to Michael’s strutting or his bouffant hairstyle.
Images of a flamboyantly curvaceous Anita Ekberg cavorting in the Fontana di Trevi in Rome have captivated film buffs the world over. But, according to three recent accounts, the most celebrated sequence in Federico Fellini’s 1960 La Dolce Vita was not just a product of the director’s imagination.
With less than two weeks to go to the May 15 Ethiopian parliamentary polls, at least 27 000 voters have to be re-registered after irregularities were found, which included 10-year-old children being registered to vote. In some areas, however, eligible voters were not even registered to take part in the election.
Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin and United States President George Bush endured one of the bitterest patches of their reputed friendship on Sunday when they made pointed criticisms of each other hours before a key meeting, and then papered over the cracks for the TV cameras.
There are many species of atheism, just as there are many species of religion. But while many religions still thrive, most of the atheisms that have ever existed are now extinct. The non-religious person today is like a person who wanders into a shop to buy a breakfast cereal and finds only one brand for sale. Moreover, this variety isn’t very tasty, because the kind of atheism that flourishes today is old and tired.
Peace returns but Guinea villagers have to wait longer for international aid. According to the finance ministry, millions of dollars’ worth of damage was inflicted in the course of fighting five years ago. The violence was prompted, in part, by a long-running dispute between Liberia and Guinea, which had allowed Liberian rebels to set up camp in its territory.