She doesn’t court publicity. She doesn’t flaunt her wealth. She has given millions to charity. JK Rowling has been a model of restraint. In little more than a decade since the first Harry Potter book was published, she has barely put a foot wrong in making the transition from single mother to one of the UK’s richest people.
Kenya’s new Parliament sought on Tuesday to speed up legislation ratifying a fragile power-sharing deal intended to guarantee the peace after a post-election crisis that killed more than 1 000 people. Members of Parliament proposed procedures so that two Bills could be approved within a five-day limit.
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer faces pressure to resign on Tuesday as well as questions about whether he will be prosecuted for any crime after a report linked him to a high-class prostitution ring. A New York Times report said the man who made his name fighting corruption hired a 000-an-hour sex worker
A Finnish library-goer apparently thought ”better late than never” and quietly returned a book on loan for more than 100 years to a library in Vantaa, Finland. The library had lost track of the loan but welcomed back to its collections the copy of a 1902 volume of Vartija, a religious monthly periodical.
The United States is not satisfied with the pace at which Israel is moving to implement a long-stalled peace ”road map”, US and Western officials said ahead of a key meeting to assess compliance with the plan. Officials said Washington also believed the Palestinians needed to do far more to meet their obligations to boost security.
Bestselling author Eoin Colfer, whose Artemis Fowl series of action-fantasy novels has sold more than nine million copies worldwide, may well wish to operate under a cloak of secrecy — as his famous teenaged creation does — when he arrives in South Africa this week.
Consumer rights champion Isabel Jones died in the early hours of Mach 11, said her son Adam Jones. Described at one time as all that stood between South Africans and high prices, Jones underwent heart surgery in November and made a full recovery, her son said.
An extinct population of small-bodied humans has been found on the Palau group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, a University of the Witwatersrand researcher said on Tuesday. Palaeoanthropologist professor Lee Berger discovered the fossils while vacationing in Palau in 2006. ”We were on a kayak excursion when a guide asked me if I wanted to see a cave with some old bones.”
Oil prices struck a record high of $109,72 per barrel on Tuesday after the dollar hit a fresh all-time low against the euro and amid persistent energy-supply concerns, traders said. New York’s main oil contract, light sweet crude for delivery in April, soared to the historic level, beating the previous peak of $108,21, which was set on Monday.
There has been substantial progress in basic service delivery in the country, Statistics South Africa said on Tuesday. It released the municipal data of its 2007 Community Survey, which gives a breakdown of basic service delivery in each of the 283 municipalities in the country.