United States talk show queen Oprah Winfrey is due to open her long-awaited school on Tuesday — fulfilling a promise she made to former President Nelson Mandela six years ago and giving more than 150 poor South African girls a chance for a better future. Mandela was invited to be among the dignitaries at the opening of the lavish Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in the small town of Henley-on-Klip.
The war waged by the French President, Jacques Chirac, against "Anglo-Saxon" cultural imperialism has suffered a blow as the Germans announced they were pulling out of a European search engine which it was hoped would rival Google. Last year Chirac announced a series of ambitious projects designed to challenge the global dominance of the United States.
Thailand’s military-installed government on Monday blamed politicians who had lost out in last year’s coup for the deadly bomb attacks that ripped through Bangkok on New Year’s Eve. After the Thai capital’s worst night of bombing for decades, embassies, including those of Britain, the United States and Australia, warned that there could be more explosions.
The Niger river snakes through nine countries in West Africa before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. It is an epic 4 200km in length, provides sustenance to millions of people — and has trouble brewing at its source. In the Faranah region of central Guinea where the river begins, small islands of sand have formed in the bed of the Niger, prompting a decline in fishing and harvests.
This month, Siemens, the Germany-based global engineering and electronics company, informed the United States Securities and Exchange Commission that prosecutors investigating the company for corruption have seized bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, two leading ”offshore” banking centres.
Mariama Alidu was cast out as a witch from her village by her own family, yet she swears she has never cast a spell. The mere suspicion of witchcraft was enough to see her and 80 other suspected witches expelled to a scruffy camp of mud huts on the fringes of the town of Gambaga in northern Ghana.
Shopping list: 340 000kg of grain; 45 000kg of meat; 10 400 cases of mixed fruits and vegetables; bees. These are just a few of the ingredients for a year’s meals to feed the elephants, big cats, bats, birds, and other beasts at New York’s zoos.
The uncontrolled use of fireworks must be banned, the National Council of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) said on Monday. ”The effect on animals last night [New Year’s Eve] was horrific, absolutely horrific… the police workload is such that they cannot be expected to respond to calls about the illegal use of fireworks, the only solution is to ban them,” said spokesperson Chris Kutch.
Australian captain Ricky Ponting has praised the work of coach John Buchanan for much of the team’s success and believes his successor has an enormous role to fill. While the headlines ahead of Tuesday’s fifth and final Ashes Test against England have been dominated by the retirements of Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer, Buchanan will also be the team coach for his last Test match.
Bulgaria and Romania made it into the European Union on New Year’s on Monday, a historic moment that drew thousands to midnight concerts although leaders warned that painful reforms were still needed. As midnight struck marking the first day of 2007, hundreds of balloons with ”Welcome Europe” written on them rose to the sky from a 30 000-strong crowd in Alexander Battenberg square