The religious groups that had pleaded with government officials to keep a severely brain-damaged woman alive in Florida are now vowing to push for stricter legal standards when it comes to denying life-sustaining measures to ailing patients. They believe Schiavo’s death could spark off a moral tsunami engulfing other families in similar situations.
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An elections observer mission from a key regional grouping raised concerns on Friday over the number of people who were turned away from polling stations during voting in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, an elections monitoring group, said it estimated that 25% of voters had been turned away from the polls nationwide.
Solutions to Africa’s problems will work only if they reflect the will of the continent’s people, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday. Writing in the African National Congress’s online publication, ANC Today, Mbeki said the Pan African Parliament confirms the determination of the peoples of Africa to promote and achieve continental unity.
The death toll on earthquake-hit islands in north-west Indonesia soared to an estimated 1 300 on Friday as panic that another disaster was imminent sent thousands of people fleeing for hills. Foreign rescue teams continued hunting for people still alive beneath the debris although hopes were ebbing away.
Stewart Butterfield launched Flickr, the online photo-sharing system, somewhat quietly at last year’s Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, California. One year later, at the same show, Flickr is running on almost everybody’s laptop, Butterfield has become a star and, we suspect, a multimillionaire.
A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo was killed and three other people were wounded by a South African United Nations peacekeeper during a food riot at a camp in Burundi, officials said Friday. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees , which runs the camp, condemned the incident but said details were still being investigated.
When Google launched a test version of Gmail on April 1 last year, the thousand or so accounts that were granted and the handful of invitations to sign others up felt like favours handed out by a benevolent deity. Now Google is tight-lipped about growing speculation that it is about to open Gmail up to the masses with a public release.
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Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) on Friday made a strong early showing in elections, taking more than a quarter of contested seats in Parliament, the electoral commission said. The MDC won 31 seats in its urban strongholds.
South Africa’s petrol price for all grades will rise by 40c a litre from April 6, the Department of Minerals and Energy announced on Friday. This brings the price of a litre of petrol to a record R5,02 in Gauteng and R4,89 at the coast. The wholesale price of diesel 0,3% sulphur will rise by 56,4 cents per litre and that of diesel 0,05% sulphur by 65,4c per litre.
More than 97Â 000 hectares of state-owned forest land in the Garden Route area around Knysna managed by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry has been formally transferred to South African National Parks as the basis for the new Garden Route National Mega Reserve.