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.
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.
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”.
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.
Kenya, facing fierce criticism over rampant sleaze, on Thursday said it would have followed South Africa’s example of sacking graft-tainted officials, but lacked evidence to take such a move, a government spokesperson said. Several graft investigations are under way in Kenya, the most vibrant economy in the East African region, but no action has been taken against top government officials.
The trouble with middle-class celebrations of middle-class values is not that they invariably devolve into orgies of materialism and one-upmanship, but that they unblinkingly reveal middle-class prejudices. Valentine’s Day is a repulsive kangaroo court where paramours are tried and convicted on the weight of their wallets.
Rocco Mediate insisted he never lost faith in his ability to play golf, even while chronic back trouble turned him into an also-ran on the PGA Tour. The pain is finally gone, and armed with a new swing and a fit, trim body, the 42-year-old went to the top of the leaderboard on Thursday at the US Open.