So there I was, desperately trying to formulate my new year’s resolutions, and the cellphone kept signalling yet another generic SMS-wish. While many bemoan what the ”festive season” does to their waistlines, the cellphone companies are certainly not complaining about what it does for their bottom lines, writes Mike van Graan.
Zimbabwe’s largest private newspaper was granted a court order on Friday barring police from interfering with publishing operations, the second to be issued in favour of the embattled paper in less than a month.
Coca-Cola and a Chinese competitor have failed to reach a court settlement in a dispute over the Chinese characters used in the names of their bottled drinks, company lawyers said on Friday. The lawyers’ statements contradicted extensive reports in China’s state-controlled media saying a settlement had been reached.
The African Christian Democratic Party on Thursday criticised the SABC for its intention to broadcast the African National Congress’s election manifesto, and the National Action urged President Thabo Mbeki to ”personally see to it” that the SABC does not broadcast the speech he is to make this weekend at the launch of the manifesto.
A man was arrested on Thursday night for allegedly raping an eight-year-old Soshanguve girl who later died of her injuries, Pretoria police reported on Friday. The girl died in the Ga-Rankuwa Hospital on Sunday, almost two weeks after she was allegedly raped by a neighbour.
Namibia this weekend is set to commemorate the start of an uprising 100 years ago by the Herero tribe against German colonial rule which was crushed pitilessly and followed by a virtual genocide.
Rights group wants apology for ‘genocide’
History is nothing if not ironic, all notions of it repeating itself as farce after initial tragedy aside. A brilliant Afrikaner dissident journalist under apartheid (harassed, intimidated and on a number of hit lists), Max du Preez found himself "too hot" to handle – and "too white" – under the new dispensation, writes Anthony Egan.
African airlines have set an ambitious target of reducing the number of accidents by 50% by the year 2010. Since this goal was set at the Association of African Airlines general assembly in Tripoli on December 10 last year — two planes have come down — in Benin and Egypt with a cost of 261 lives.
Sometimes even journalists get lucky. Last week I was stranded for four frustrating hours in Geneva airport, waiting for a connecting flight that somehow had vanished off the computers. Near the check-out counters, I was approached by a grimy tout who snuck up close and leered at me. ”Want to buy some feelthy Christmas cards?” he wheedled.
The celebration of South Africa’s 10-year-old democracy will not resonate in soccer the way things are now. The under-23 squad are on tenterhooks as to whether they’ll be off to Athens later this year, but the biggest blow must be Shakes’s seven-day suspension on the even of the Nations Cup.