Mark Thatcher, the son of the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, left South Africa a free man on Thursday night after agreeing to pay a R3-million fine for his role in a coup plot which could have landed him in jail for 15 years. He flew to London and was thought to be bound for the United States to join his wife and two children after pleading guilty to funding an attempt by mercenaries to topple the government of Equatorial Guinea.

Graphic details emerged on Thursday night of the allegations made by the boy accusing Michael Jackson of molestation, including an explicit account of how he was allegedly plied with alcohol and masturbated by the pop star. Jackson faces 10 counts of child molestation and conspiracy.

Balancing on the edge of the wooden catamaran, Anura Aparekkag stares long and hard at the blue waters lapping at the sides of his boat. ”No fish today. No fish yesterday. They are too scared to come back here,” he says. In the two hours since leaving the sands of Koggala, the 5m vessel has plied the waters along the coast in a futile search for fish that once could be scooped out of this ocean by hand.

Spoornet CEO, Dolly Mokgatle’s resignation was the climax of a war with Maria Ramos over the rail giant’s management and strategic direction. Mokgatle was swept out of the second hardest executive job in the country this week, because she couldn’t hold her own against the woman who has the hardest — her boss, Maria Ramos.

The insurance industry refers to ”acts of God”. Does last month’s tsunami qualify? How does the worst natural disaster for half a century square with the ideas of a divine plan and divine providence? How could a merciful and just God allow the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean to shift so catastrophically? The Mail & Guardian asked local religious leaders for their views.

Mahmoud Abbas, the newly elected Palestinian president, faced his first big test on Thursday night when Palestinian militants detonated a bomb on the edge of the Gaza Strip, killing at least five Israelis. The explosives were packed into a truck which the militants drove into the Karni crossing into Gaza at around 11pm.

The United States’s human rights abuses have provided a rallying cry for terrorists and set a bad example to regimes seeking to justify their own poor rights records, a leading independent watchdog said on Thursday. The torture of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay have undermined the credibility of the US as a defender of human rights and opponent of terrorism, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says in its annual report.