United States First Lady Laura Bush underscored the importance of literacy, especially for young women, while visiting Egypt on Monday for the last leg of a Middle East tour. She had arrived on Monday from Israel, where she encountered angry anti-American protests. ”I’m not surprised at all,” she said about the protests.
South Africa’s Parliament has a strategic plan that includes the intention of turning the institution into "a beacon of good moral behaviour", according to its secretary, Zingile Dingani. On Monday, journalists asked why it is that parliamentarians are able to remain on as members after being convicted of Travelgate fraud charges.
Headman Nkonzo was clutching a hosepipe on level 32 of shaft four at East Driefontein gold mine on Monday when the earth began shaking violently. The 53-year-old mineworker said all he could think when the rocks began falling was that he was going to die. ”I was scared, it was all too much,” he said.
Displaying toilet seats studded with flowers and shells, colorful bathtubs, faucets, mirrors and shower curtains, the well-lit window in the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung looks like a showroom for a trendy bathroom brand — but it is a restaurant. Customers eat off plates and bowls shaped like Western loo seats or Japanese "squat toilets".
An Indonesian city mayor incensed by poor discipline among his staff has sent more than 100 officials to a police boot camp in a novel move that may help tackle the country’s rampant corruption, an official said on Monday. Fauzi Bahri, the mayor of the Sumatra city of Padang, dispatched 115 regional leaders to the 10-day course.
Most of South Africa’s 14 provincial rugby presidents jetted into Johannesburg International airport on Monday to attend an urgent meeting at Ellis Park stadium as a cloud of uncertainty decended over the whole power-struggle saga. The meeting was hastily called by South African Rugby Union president Brian van Rooyen late on Sunday.
An Australian woman who stabbed her elderly mother 48 times with a kitchen knife because she complained her lamb chops were undercooked should be spared a jail sentence, the judge hearing the case said on Monday. Julie Smith (49) pleaded guilty to intentionally causing serious injury to her 71-year-old mother Barbara Smith last January in the Melbourne suburban home the two women shared.
More than a thousand previously unknown letters, said to have been written by the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso, are to be made available to the public next month, according to a report published on Sunday. Mystery surrounds the find, which promises to be among the most exciting musicological discoveries of recent years.
German internet security experts declared victory on Monday in a bid to head off a computer virus before it spreads through millions of personal computers worldwide. Sober.P is the computer worm that sent neo-Nazi German-language e-mails on to hundreds of thousands of computers last week.
More and more people are committing family killings because they are "catching", Family and Life Centre director Liz Dooley said on Monday. Her comments follow a bloody fortnight for some South African families. Just over the weekend, 15 people died when men opened fire on their families.