Pope Benedict XVI visited a synagogue in Cologne on Friday in a clear sign that building better relations between the Catholic church and other faiths would play an important role in his papacy. The German pontiff, who served briefly and unwillingly in the Hitler Youth, visited the city-centre synagogue which was destroyed by the Nazis and later rebuilt.
Former apartheid-era security police colonel Gideon Nieuwoudt died in Port Elizabeth on Friday after a battle with cancer, his lawyer Jan Wagener said. Wagener said Nieuwoudt, who was in his mid-fifties, had cancer of the lungs which had spread to other organs, and there had also been worrying tumours on his brain.
The name Louis Trichardt was shoved down the throats of the majority of people living there and they were entitled to change it to one with historical significance to them, the Pretoria High Court heard on Friday. The Louis Trichardt Chairperson’s Association applied to the High Court to set aside a decision to change the town’s name to Makhado.
Members of Zimbabwe’s football team are being rewarded for winning a regional tournament with plots of land cleared of township homes. The team, known as the Warriors, won the Confederation of Southern African Football Associations (Cosafa) Cup on Sunday with a surprise 1-0 victory over Zambia in South Africa.
To Australians, it is the linguistic equivalent of beer and barbecues — but the ubiquitous greeting of ”mate” was in danger of being banned at the nation’s centre of government. In an edict from a senior civil servant, security staff at Australia’s national parliament were told to stop using the greeting ”G’day mate” when admitting visitors and politicians.
Condemning the Scorpions’ raid on the office of the attorney of former deputy president Jacob Zuma, the General Council of the Bar of South Africa on Friday called on them to return everything they had seized as soon as possible. The raid appeared to violate the principle of attorney-client privilege, the GCB charged.
After Bafana Bafana’s 4-1 ”roasting in Reykjavic” against Iceland, coach Stuart Baxter on Friday announced he was left with three options to lift spirits and form before next month’s critical away World Cup qualifying game against Burkina Faso.
He lived by the gun and he died by the gun. Now the late writer Hunter S Thompson is to be blasted from a cannon from the back garden of his home in the hills of Aspen, Colorado. Thompson’s ashes have been packed into firework casings and will be dispersed from 34 different shells fired from a gun barrel mounted on top of a 150-foot high monument.
About 4 000 people have fled to Chad in the past eight days because of attacks by unidentified armed groups in the Central African Republic, the United Nations refugee agency said on Friday. The new arrivals told members of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees that they were fleeing from violence in the northwestern Paoua region.
Burundi’s Parliament overwhelming elected a former rebel leader president on Friday, culminating a three-year peace process after almost 12 years of civil war in the central African country. Pierre Nkurunziza’s election had been expected, as his Force for the Defence of Democracy, once Burundi’s largest Hutu-led rebel group and now a political party, controls both houses of Parliament.