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/ 21 December 2004
Harry Potter readers, here’s an extra special holiday gift: JK Rowling announced that she has completed the sixth Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The book will go on sale in Britain and the United States on July 16, publishers said on Tuesday. Rowling has said that one of her characters will not survive her sixth book.
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/ 21 December 2004
A passenger bus careered off a mountain road in Peru and plunged into a jungle river, killing 49 people and injuring 15 others, police said. The accident occurred on Sunday in the Andean jungle, 346km north-east of the capital, officer Juan Siu Gomez said on Monday via telephone from Aguaytia, near the crash site.
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/ 21 December 2004
The Hong Kong customs office on Tuesday kicked up a stink over what it called a ”fart bomb toy”, describing it as unsafe. The small silver metallic bag, showing a cheeky boy with his trousers down emitting a cloud that reads ”boom”, contains a powdered sulphur compound and a small plastic bag of diluted acid.
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/ 21 December 2004
Media fuss about admission tests for universities is unfounded, as the minister of education and the universities are not in disagreement on the matter, the ministry said on Monday. ”It is highly regrettable that certain political parties have chosen to exploit the matter for petty point-scoring,” said ministry spokesperson Rob Turrell.
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/ 21 December 2004
Zambian police have released all 68 protesters, including several MPs, who were arrested for participating in a banned opposition demonstration to demand a new Constitution, an official said on Tuesday. ”They will appear in court soon,” police spokesperson Brenda Muntemba said.
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/ 21 December 2004
Police on Tuesday arrested four suspects who allegedly killed a Heidelberg farmer by dragging him behind his own vehicle with a rope tied round his neck, spokesperson Superintendent Andy Pieke said. The body of Joaquim Homem de Gouveia (70) was found on December 18 on a deserted area of the farm.
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/ 21 December 2004
Talks held in Moscow between various parties involved in Harmony Gold Mining’s ,9-billion takeover bid for Gold Fields have been described as ”constructive” without any details of the discussions being revealed. If successful, the Harmony bid would create the world’s largest gold mining company. The talks were held on Friday in Moscow in an attempt to find a new way forward in the two-month old takeover saga.
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/ 21 December 2004
A giant straw goat erected by local businessmen in the town of Gavle was torched — again — in what has become a holiday tradition some would call arson. A smouldering pile of wood and metal was all that remained on Tuesday of the traditional Swedish good-luck goat that businessmen in Gavle erect annually.
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/ 21 December 2004
More than 100 000 Congolese have fled renewed fighting between the Democratic Republic of Congo army and rebels in the battle-torn east of the country, United Nations officials said on Monday. The civilians trekked deep into the mountainous jungle to escape weekend fighting around the deserted farming town of Kanyabayonga.
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/ 21 December 2004
To the Indian schoolboy, it must have seemed like an ingenious if indelicate use of new technology. But when the 17-year-old used his mobile phone camera to record his girlfriend giving him oral sex he could have had little idea of the far-reaching global consequences. By Monday, his ungentlemanly act had provoked a scandal that was dominating every Indian newspaper.