No other subject has generated such fever among football fans and officials over the past few months as the sale of 3,7-million tickets for the World Cup’s 64 matches. And the problematic issue looks set to occupy the public right up to the tournament final on July 9.
Aspen, South Africa’s largest listed pharmaceutical company, on Tuesday announced that it has reached an agreement with Roche to produce a generic version of oseltamivir for Africa. The drug is currently marketed by Roche under the trade name Tamiflu.
Internet search titan Yahoo! showed its new face to the world on Tuesday with the online debut of its revamped website. The new Yahoo! page mixes news updates and entertainment with tools for searching, connecting, sharing and communicating online.
More than 22 000 people have been evacuated from the slopes of Indonesia’s smoke-belching Mount Merapi, but the volcano appeared to have temporarily calmed down early on Tuesday. Clear weather after dawn showed a relatively peaceful Merapi, with thin smoke streaming out of its peak and none of Monday’s impressive heat cloud torrents.
Vehicle monitoring firm Tracker has urged a reporter for The Star newspaper to reveal the identity of a former employee who reportedly leaked confidential information to a crime syndicate. According to the report, a former employee of Tracker claimed syndicates bribed him to hand over secret information identifying cars fitted with tracking devices and where these were located in the vehicles.
Spanish authorities on Monday pledged to use satellite monitoring and a diplomatic offensive to prevent fresh waves of fishing boats full of illegal immigrants setting out from West Africa for the Canary Islands. The move came after a weekend in which a record-breaking 974 illegal African immigrants reached the islands in boats that had set out from Mauritania and Senegal.
United States President George Bush, scrambling to hold on to an increasingly disaffected conservative Republican base, said on Monday night that he was deploying thousands of troops on the US border with Mexico to crack down on illegal immigration.
Edwin Cameron, the HIV-positive Supreme Court of Appeal judge, has called for HIV/Aids to be treated as a "normal" disease in order to counteract the stigma surrounding the virus, and to encourage people to be tested and to seek treatment. In a speech that is already stirring heated debate, Cameron suggested that in some circumstances pre-test counselling should be dispensed with.
We should have been celebrating the 10year anniversary of an extraordinary document, the Constitution. Instead, we were all glued to the television or radio. Inevitably, the verdict totally eclipsed the anniversary; Jacob Zuma stole the show — an exquisitely painful irony, yet also strangely apt.
We publish a translation of the May 1 speech by Bolivian President Evo Morales announcing the nationalisation of that country’s hydro-carbon resources. This translation is based on the Spanish-language text provided on the Bolivian Information Agency website.