Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika says he refuses to forgive two journalists who wrote that he was afraid of ghosts and that they will have to defend themselves in court, state television reported on Friday. ”It was a total lie designed to destroy my character … that’s why I will not forgive them,” Mutharika told a rally in Lilongwe on Thursday.
All Blacks halfback Byron Kelleher scored two tries as the Waikato Chiefs overran South Africa’s Cats 45-14 in a Super 12 rugby match at the Waikato Stadium on Friday. The Chiefs’ loose forwards and outside backs stood out as they posted their second straight four-try victory over a South African opponent to bounce off the bottom of the table.
A British grandmother scared a burglar away by hurling a garden gnome at the intruder who was consequently arrested by police, reports said on Friday. Sixty-nine-year-old Jean Collop was woken early on Tuesday morning by the sound of an intruder on the roof of her home in Wadebridge, Cornwall.
People jumped from windows or screamed for rescue from flames as a pre-dawn fire on Friday roared through a Paris hotel used by local government to house needy African families, killing at least 20 people, half of them children. More than 50 people were injured, 11 seriously, in the blaze that was thought to have started in a first-floor breakfast room of the one-star Paris Opera hotel.
A week after the Mail & Guardian reported the four-year mystery of a nuclear worker’s death, his family received a surprise R6 000 cheque from the Department of Labour. The covering letter stipulated that the money was for burial expenses –although Victor Motha was buried four years ago and his family has received a departmental refund for funeral costs
The firing of Free State African National Congress chairperson Elias ”Ace” Magashule from the provincial Cabinet last week is seen as the first step in eliminating him from provincial politics. The Mail & Guardian was told this week that powerful figures are plotting to oust Magashule as Free State chairperson at the provincial congress in June.
Eastern Cape Premier Nosimo Balindlela has appointed a commission of inquiry into the province’s financial affairs, including maladministration, fraud and corruption in all state departments and parastatals. The announcement follows the arrest of provincial housing minister Neo Moerane-Mamase and her husband, former agricultural minister Max Mamase.
Equatorial Guinea on Thursday flatly denied charges by Amnesty International that scores of prisoners at a jail in the capital Malabo, including alleged mercenaries, were at risk of dying of starvation. Jailers at Black Beach prison have stopped providing at least 70 prisoners with meals and blocked all contact with their families, the group said.
A planned media briefing on Friday morning to articulate the latest developments surrounding taxi violence in the Western Cape was called off at the last minute to accommodate a march by one of the protagonists, Codeta. Provincial transport minister Mcebisi Skwatsha decided to postpone the meeting to allow all parties a chance to express their concersn.
This whole white male/baboon matter has been shockingly one-sided. It’s one thing to sit, bathed in academic reverie in some university, composing long self-pitying tirades about the behavioural equivalences between certain cabals among Homo sapiens europeanus, and Papio ursinus in general. It’s quite another to take the trouble to canvass the opinions of the latter side of the equation.