A former in-house Enron accountant who signed off on a year-end 1999 alleged sham sale of several barges to Merrill Lynch told prosecutors he thought the deal was wrong from the beginning. Now he awaits questioning from the lawyer representing his former boss, Sheila Kahanek, who is one of six defendants on trial for fraud and conspiracy stemming from the deal.
Deputy-President Jacob Zuma is ”unfazed” by media reports on Sunday that a KPMG report would show an ”extensive financial relationship” between him and his financial adviser, Schabir Shaik. Shaik would go on a corruption trial that may drag on for months in the Durban High Court from Monday next week.
Shaik trial: ‘Zuma was bribed’
The death toll from floods unleashed by Tropical Storm Jeanne rose sharply to nearly 2 000 people, with many still missing, as officials said they found hundreds more bodies in Haiti’s devastated northwestern region. The new toll stands at 1 970 dead and 884 missing, said Dieufort Deslorges, a spokesperson for Haiti’s civil protection agency.
Doctors in Germany have rebuilt a man’s face after growing a new jaw on his back. By the fourth week after receiving the pioneering transplant the patient was able to enjoy his first solid meal for nine years. The 56-year-old man tucked into a hearty dinner of bread and sausages in a hospital in Kiel, Germany.
Some wore buckets on their heads, others swung sticks, and those who could sheltered indoors, praying for an end to the locust invasion which on Sunday swept through Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott. The swarm devastated crops and the city’s few parks, and left residents feeling besieged and impotent in the face of west Africa’s worst locust infestation for over a decade.
From the outside, the local community association on the west side of Chicago doesn’t look much. The only sign on the shabby one-storey building is a piece of paper stuffed inside a clear plastic jacket on the front door. The building was supposed to be a temporary home but somehow years have gone by and the organisation is still there.
Ariel Sharon said on Sunday that an assault on the Gaza strip that has claimed more than 60 lives and injured 250 people — the bloodiest of the intifada — will be expanded until it puts an end to Hamas rocket strikes against Israel. At least eight people were killed on Sunday, most of them insurgents.
World silence ‘encourages’ Sharon
Four online publishers, Creamer Media, 5FM Music, JHBLive and Business in Africa, have joined the ranks of the Online Publishing Association (OPA), it was announced on Monday. The new members now bring the total number of online publishers that are part of the OPA to 21.
Despite the recent teachers’ strike, things have gone well for Naledi Pandor, the Minister of Education. But surely her predecessors will have told Pandor that dragons, far more fierce than some vice-chancellors, lurk in the gloomy waters around South Africa’s universities. After 10 years of "torrid government interference" in universities, Peter Vale offers six of the best to the new Minister of Education.
<i>Fahrenheit 451</i> was a Ray Bradbury science fiction classic novel that was turned into a futuristic (well, futuristic in those days) movie in 1966 by the great French New Wave director Francois Truffaut. And of course, by his choice of title for his new documentary, Michale Moore inevitably invites comparison with the earlier work and his <i>Fahrenheit 9/11</i>.