Dvir Hemo was 11 years old when he stepped in front of a car one Saturday evening on his way to get pizza. By sunset the next day, his body had been interred in the small, neat cemetery in the Jewish settlement block of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, where the Star of David flies over 46 graves.
Movie company Sasani could announce a final deal to dispose of its remaining assets within a week to ten days, closing the book on its short existence as a JSE-listed one-stop-shop for the film industry.
This week, I thought, I’d show you the origins of real horror. No, I’m not talking about those naked pictures of Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, I mean horror films. As a serious film and horror geek, I want to do this properly, so rather than give a simplistic overview of this subject, I’m going to spread this over two columns. This first part covers the basics of horror films.
On March 19, 750 people from the Kennedy Road informal settlement in Clare Estate, Durban, blockaded Kennedy Road with burning tyres and mattresses for four hours. Residents in the informal settlement had been promised for more than a decade that a small spit of land in nearby Elf Road would be made available to them for the development of housing.
Germany’s embattled Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, suffered another blow on Tuesday when the former chairperson of his Social Democrat party (SPD) said he was defecting to a new leftwing alliance. Oskar Lafontaine said that in the September general election he would stand as a candidate for a rival leftwing group made up of communists and disaffected SPD members.
I’m not a fan. Which made it even more surprising, that whump in the stomach when I heard Kylie Minogue had postponed the Australian leg of her world tour after being diagnosed with breast cancer. There’s something disingenuous about feeling terribly distressed when an attractive, 37-year-old celebrity has breast cancer.
My friend in Mutare, Zimbabwe, writes me an e-mail: ”The roses are blooming in the garden, my German shepherd sleeps under the window and my young lover is back in my arms.” Sounds like bliss. They were together in 2000, split, and hitched up again this year. My friend is 53 and he is 33. How does tiny Mutare react to them?
If imitation is flattery, Miss Universe contestants should feel properly buttered-up in Thailand, where people find occasions year-round to award a crown and a sash to queens who sometimes break the mould. Or the moulding, as was the case when parts of the stage knocked loose during a sports-themed dance sequence at the Miss Jumbo Queen pageant for women 80kg and over.
”In countries like ours, women enter politics in mourning clothes.” Christian opposition MP Nayla Moawad, who made the comment, is one of a few women running for a seat in Lebanon’s male-dominated Parliament. She was propelled on to the tribal political scene by the 1989 murder of her husband, president Rene Moawad.
Rescuers searched on Tuesday night for the bodies of four construction workers buried when an excavation trench collapsed outside a water-sports shop in Randburg earlier that day. At about 7.30pm, a man was rescued after being wedged for four hours under a boulder lying diagonally over the trench.