Take five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who are working in an ill-equipped hospital. Accuse them wrongly of infecting 426 children with HIV-contaminated blood. Then lock them up for eight years, torture confessions out of them and sentence them to death, and you end up with a full partnership deal with the European Union.
It must rank among the greatest compliments the late Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, ever received. A court in Chicago recently heard Frank Calabrese Sr commend the description in the novel of a mafia initiation ceremony as ”very close” to the truth. Coming from Calabrese, that was high praise indeed. He is alleged to be a head of one of Chicago’s most notorious crime syndicates, the Outfit.
The Mail & Guardian‘s latest ”exposé” of ostensibly malevolent higher education management (”Education under the axe”, July 13) — this time aimed at Unisa’s academic restructuring — cannot go unchallenged. Unisa wishes to set the record straight and foster a more nuanced and insightful debate on the restructuring of higher education, writes Narend Baijnath.
You wouldn’t know it if you visited Barry Aaron’s Sandton law offices, but South African courts have been setting some fine precedents on how press freedom functions within the carefully poised architecture of the Bill of Rights. Nevertheless, Aaron’s clients pay to keep him in the tawdry pastiche of Nelson Mandela Square, writes Nic Dawes.
Spaniard Alberto Contador won the drug-tainted Tour de France in Paris on Sunday when he held on to his 23-second overnight lead on Australia’s Cadel Evans to secure the race’s fabled yellow jersey. Contador becomes the first Spaniard to win the three-week race since Miguel Indurain from 1991 to 1995.
Soon after I started working at the SABC in 2002, I was asked to chair a panel to hear the appeal of a Limpopo reporter who had been dismissed for "bringing the SABC into disrepute". The man had killed his wife. He was appealing his dismissal because, as he said, it was his own wife and he had done it "on his own time" — he had been on leave. We rejected his appeal, and later the courts sentenced him to a lengthy jail term.
More than a half-century after he finished the requirements to earn the rank, an 88-year-old man was honored as an Eagle Scout, making him possibly the oldest person yet to collect the Boy Scout honour. Walter Hart could not become an Eagle Scout at the time he earned the rank because his service in World War II got in the way.
The army was called out for rescue operations on Sunday as more than a million people were marooned in north-east India, which has been hit by raging floods, officials said. The latest deaths took to 15 the number of people killed in flood-related accidents in the past week in Assam and adjoining Meghalaya.
South African publishers have placed restrictions on the comic book Tintin in the Congo following complaints of racism in Britain. The illustrated work by Belgian author-cartoonist Georges Remi, who wrote under a pen name, is the second in a series of 23 tracing the adventures of Tintin and his dog, Snowy.
The Liberian government has lifted a self-imposed moratorium on the mining, sale and export of diamonds that had been in place for six years, officials said on Saturday. Deputy Minister of Lands, Mines and Energy Kpandeh Fayia said that, ”as of Monday, people can start applying for mining, selling and broker licences” for the stones.