A former Maoist radical has launched Beijing’s first bunny bar, but China’s playboy revolution is already foundering. In the 70s CK Yu, the son of a Taiwanese general, was running a bookshop in California selling the works of Mao Zedong. Yu’s bar, Buck and Bunny, opened last Friday in Sanlitun, the capital’s diplomatic district.
With due pomp and ceremony the Royal Navy handed over the submarine HMS Upholder to the Canadians at the weekend. The vessel was renamed HMCS Chicoutimi — after the city on the edge of Quebec’s vast northern wilds — and the maple leaf flag was hoisted. Then after its final preparations, it began to chug towards Nova Scotia.
The hour-long drive up route 93 from Boston to Derry in New Hampshire (population 34 021) is punctuated by banners calling on people to ”support the troops” and others saying ”bring the troops home”. It is also framed by a New England fall.
Debt servicing at any level is incompatible with attaining the United Nations Millennium Development Goals in many African countries, according to <i>Debt Sustainability: Oasis or Mirage?</i>, released today by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad). The report concludes that any lasting solution to the debt overhang hinges as much on political will as on financial rectitude.
A cold front will hit the Western Cape province from Wednesday evening and should continue moving over South Africa, while at the same time bringing rain, until Tuesday next week, said South African Weather Service (Saws) forecaster Evert Scholtz. There should be heavy showers over parts of the Western and Eastern Cape up until Friday.
One of the 68 men held in a Zimbabwean jail over an alleged plot to overthrow the government in Equatorial Guinea died on Tuesday, the state news agency reported. Ngave Jarukemo Muharukua (35) died in a Harare hospital where he had been admitted last week, the Ziana news agency said. The cause of death was not revealed.
Three news photographers were arrested in Zimbabwe while trying to cover a protest outside Parliament by about 30 women who were also detained by police, their lawyer said on Wednesday. The photographers, who include Reuters photojournalist Howard Burditt, were picked up by police on Tuesday afternoon while covering the arrest of around 30 women demonstrators.
South Africa’s Minister of Labour, Membathisi Mdladlana, said on Tuesday that skills-and-development programmes were critically important in meeting the Government’s aim of halving poverty and unemployment by 2014. Speaking on the last day of the Imbizo Programme in Limpopo, Mdladlana commended community-development initiatives in providing skills and creating jobs for local communities.
A South African man has been killed in Iraq and is believed to have been beheaded, according to a report carried by the Johannesburg newspaper, The Star, on Wednesday. The former Pretoria Task Force policeman, who was working for an American paramilitary company, was the eighth South African killed in Iraq since January, the newspaper said.
Desperate to drive into a lake? You’ll be after a Gibbs Aquada, then. It’s the world’s first factory-produced, customer-ready, high-speed amphibian and represents a one-stop shop for all your car-dunking needs. True, you can get amphibious vehicles in kit form. And the military might be prepared to sell you something it has finished with. But they won’t do 56kph across water and come with a stereo.