Namibia’s annual seal hunting season started this week, over the protests of animal rights activists who say the practice is cruel. The government accused the activists of ”deliberately distorting information,” and said controlling the seal population was important for the fishing industry.
The Nigerian kidnappers of a three-year-old British girl have demanded money and negotiations to secure her release are about to start, the girl’s mother told Reuters on Friday. The toddler, Margaret Hill, was snatched on Thursday morning from the car in which she was being driven to school in Port Harcourt.
A Spanish woman who pulled the mask off a man as he tried to strangle her was astonished to discover the attacker was her estranged husband, Spanish media reported on Friday. The woman had thought the masked man, who burst into the bakery where she worked in the city of Valencia, was a robber.
Mitigation, mitigation, mitigation — the need for action to halt climate change will be hammered home at eight Live Earth concerts on seven continents on Saturday. In Johannesburg, that message has dictated the choice of materials in what is being billed as a carbon-neutral concert.
Rafael Nadal beat Tomas Berdych 7-6 6-4 6-2 to reach the Wimbledon semifinals on Friday. The players had trouble adjusting to the wind on Centre Court in the opening games with number two seed Nadal breaking Berdych’s serve in the second and the Czech, seeded seventh, breaking back immediately.
Thousands of Palestinians marched in Gaza on Friday for the funerals of 11 people, including nine militants from the ruling Hamas, who were killed in an Israeli raid into the central Gaza Strip a day earlier. The Israeli army said it had concluded an incursion into central Gaza near the Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps.
Photographs of soldiers’ garments show the contradictions of war, writes Tanya Farber.
Two ”countdown clocks” to the 2010 Soccer World Cup were switched on at Durban International Airport on Friday, a sponsor said. ”The clocks are counting us down to our deadline and bringing us together to unveil our beautiful city to the rest of the world,” said First National Bank’s KwaZulu-Natal chief, Gareth Davies.
Hundreds of President Robert Mugabe’s supporters marched through Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, on Friday in support of an official price freeze introduced to curb the world’s highest inflation rate of over 4Â 500%. The march was planned ahead of a ruling Zanu-PF party meeting to adopt tougher measures against firms defying the freeze.
Global warming is radically changing the face of Mount Everest, the sons of the men who first reached its summit 54 years ago said in an interview published on Friday. The sons of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay told British newspaper the <i>Independent</i> that their fathers would no longer recognise the world’s highest mountain.