Famed United States photographer Richard Avedon was hospitalised over the weekend following a brain haemorrhage, a spokesperson for The New Yorker magazine said on Thursday. The photographer is in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas, and is ”in critical but stable condition,” said a spokesperson.
Bill Gates has had a bad week at the office. The man who has made it a personal mission to see spam eradicated from our inboxes saw Microsoft’s Sender ID anti-spam technology returned to sender by the Internet Engineering Task Force, and was subsequently snubbed by the world’s biggest Internet service provider, America Online (AOL).
Politicians, industry leaders and environment groups across the world welcomed the news on Thursday night that Russia had rejuvenated international efforts to combat climate change by ratifying the Kyoto protocol. President Vladimir Putin’s decision isolates the United States, and brings Russia closer economic and political ties with the European Union.
Unions and management were in a last-minute meeting on Thursday night to try to prevent a strike at Anglo Platinum, while a 17000 worker strike at Impala Platinum continued. Anglo Platinum (Amplats) management brought a revised offer to the National Union of Mineworkers at 6pm.
The newly established Pan African Parliament will send a fact-finding mission to Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, which the UN says is the scene of the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world today. The Parliament’s president says the mission will examine ”what is happening on the ground, who is doing what and how much is being done by the Sudanese government…”
Dozens of children were killed on Thursday when three car bombs exploded in a coordinated attack in Baghdad that left 44 people dead and more than 200 injured.
Health ministry officials said at least 34 of those killed were children. Dozens more were injured. Many suffered shrapnel wounds; others had limbs amputated.
Democratic challenger John Kerry won the first televised presidential debate against Republican President George Bush late on Thursday, according to instant polls. A Gallup poll for CNN gave Kerry a 46% to 37% win over the president. It added that 46% of those asked now have a better opinion of Kerry against 21% for Bush.
An alleged kingpin in the network that helped states acquire illicit nuclear technology has left a trail of footprints in South Africa, and a Pandora’s box of proliferation secrets has been opened. The Regional Court in Vanderbijlpark on Tuesday denied bail to two South African residents who had allegedly manufactured part of a uranium-enrichment plant destined for Libya.
Two years after throwing his weight, credibility and, some say, money behind a noble cause, Patrice Motsepe’s endeavour to revive the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce (Nafcoc) seems to have been largely fruitless. As Nafcoc prepares to elect office-bearers for a new term in less than three weeks, the organisation is plagued with infighting.
An ”egregious carpetbagger” is a sobriquet coined by Ken Owen, former editor of the Sunday Times, which he applied with some enthusiasm to Ronald Suresh Roberts, former authorised biographer of Nadine Gordimer. I hope Owen will forgive my borrowing his words to describe the BBC World’s television interviewer, Tim Sebastian, for if ever there was a carpetbagger it is he.