Armed bandits raided a luxury safari camp near Kenya’s famed Maasai Mara game reserve early on Tuesday, stealing cash and passports from British and United States tourists staying there, officials said. About six men with AK-47 assault rifles and machetes stormed the Mara Porini Camp in a private conservancy just outside the wildlife-rich reserve shortly after midnight.
A flock of hungry sheep gobbled up banknotes totalling 100 000 yuan ($12 500) that were the public funds of a northern Chinese village, state media reported on Tuesday. A farmer who was also the treasurer of Linjiawan village in Shaanxi province was devastated when he found out the cash he had hidden underneath his sheep pasture was mostly chewed up by the beasts.
Tensions between Congress of South African Trade Unions president Willie Madisha and its general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi ran so high that mediators were called in to settle their conflict. At its heart is a fight for the political direction of the federation, which has been drawn four square into the succession battle. Recently, communist leader Blade Nzimande was pulled into the fray.
One of Australia’s great Olympic rowers, Mervyn Wood, passed away on the weekend of August 20 and 21 after a long battle with cancer, the Australian Olympic Committee said on Monday. He was 89. Wood represented Australia at four Olympic Games and won three medals.
Israeli author Yizhar Smilansky, whose works on the 1948 War of Independence sparked debate and soul-searching in the Jewish state, died on August 21, his family said. He was 89. Considered one of Israel’s greatest writers, Smilansky was born to a family of Russian immigrants in what is today Rehovot, Israel.
Tata Steel KwaZulu-Natal on Monday celebrated the start of construction of its R670-million ferrochrome plant at Richards Bay with a groundbreaking ceremony in the Industrial Development Zone, at Alton North area, in the largest port city in KwaZulu-Natal. A plaque was unveiled by Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.
Africa’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, Aspen Pharmacare on Monday reported a 235% increase in headline earnings per share from 185,5 cents to 144,7 cents for the year to the end of June. The group’s operating profit increased by 96% to R968-million — on the back of a 23% growth in revenue to R3,449-billion.
Retirement funds should include hedge funds in their investment plans to ensure they construct optimal portfolios to protect South Africa’s limited savings, said Warren Brown, the head of fixed interest and financial modelling at Old Mutual. Brown was reacting to concerns about the lack of a clear regulatory and taxation regime for hedge funds.
Embattled Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi on Monday appointed a new, scaled-down Cabinet to replace a dissent-riddled government dissolved earlier this month. Gedi named the 31-strong slate as tensions rose anew between his weak transitional administration and Somalia’s newly dominant Islamists.
One of South Africa’s most decorated investigative journalists, Barry Sergeant, talks to us about his controversial new book <i>Brett Kebble – The Inside Story</i>.
Having given the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group time to mourn their slain commander Raska Lukwiya, the second round of peace talks between the Ugandan government and the rebels is due to resume on Friday in Juba, southern Sudan.
More than 70 Taliban guerrillas have been killed in fighting with Nato and Afghan forces in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, a provincial police official said on Sunday. The battle erupted late on Saturday after hundreds of Taliban attacked the district government headquarters.
The death toll in China from Typhoon Saomai rose by 106 to 436 on Friday with the confirmation of dozens more deaths in the eastern province of Zhejiang, state media said. All 106 new fatalities were in the coastal province of Zhejiang, which had previously reported 87 dead and 52 missing, Xinhua news agency said.
In a clear signal of its commitment to growing its business in Africa, the Coca-Cola Company is relocating its Africa group office from Windsor in the United Kingdom to Johannesburg, South Africa, beginning in January 2007, the company announced on Friday. The final move will be completed in June 2007.
Like many of my Protestant-born ilk, I was dismayed at yet more accusations of grimy carnal goings-on among the Catholic clergy. Not that, for even one lapsed Anglican minute, I believe one word of the lurid sensationalist twaddle of how children have been abused sexually by certain of God’s chosen representatives on Earth.
Hedonism is by definition an urgent philosophy. To demur, to decline, even to hesitate, is to fail. In a world in which all delights must be sampled, and all desires sated, there is no place for the passive thrill-seeker. If he lies face-down on the Ottoman in his vomitorium it must be because he has misjudged his ability to have sex with five people of various genders while eating chip-rolls and custard slices.
<b>MOVIE MONTHLY:</b> <i>The Commitments</i> fans will enjoy <i>The Boys from County Clare</i> — no less for Andrea Corr’s acting debut. The ever-controversial director Lars von Trier stirs the pot with <i>Dogville</i>, starring Nicole Kidman, and fans of that famous lasagne-loving kitty will be pleased to hear <i>Garfield</i> is here.
And the answers are … See how you fared
Twelve years on, the commanding heights of the economy are finally being tackled in the service of the ordinary man and woman. In electricity, the regulator has found Eskom negligence behind the power cuts that caused widespread disruption in the Western Cape; that its highly paid executives were essentially asleep at the switch.
Power utility Eskom on Thursday said that in the case of the recent power outages in the Western Cape it accepted that there were oversights regarding some of its practices and procedures. However, this did not mean that Eskom had been negligent. Every technical fault did not amount to a breach of a licence condition or negligence, it added.
Police at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport on Thursday released a warning for hallucinogenic dark chocolate bars after a homeless man ate one and confused their uniforms with wedding dresses. "He ate some and we found him hallucinating", mixing up police uniforms with wedding dresses, police spokesperson Rob Stenacker said.
A United States-led coalition warplane mistakenly dropped a bomb on an Afghan police convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing 12 police officers, a police commander said. The coalition confirmed "an event did happen" and said it was collecting details.
South African Breweries (SAB) has again warned consumers about an e-mail scan that is being widely circulated in South Africa and which promises free products from the company. SAB initially put a warning out to the public on July 20 and the e-mail has once again appeared in the public domain, SAB said in a statement on Thursday.
The international community should refrain from interfering in Somalia and maintain a United Nations arms embargo, the United Nation’s envoy to Somalia, Francois Lonseny Fall, told the UN Security Council. In a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, Fall also urged the 15-member council to pressure Somalia’s government and the Islamists to avoid provocations.
Counterfeit money has come into circulation in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, less than a week before the complete changeover to a new currency introduced by Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Gideon Gono last week. The counterfeiters appear to be targeting street vendors and other unsuspecting traders.
This year’s nominees and judges for the Arts and Culture Trust (ACT) Awards, held in association with the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> and Nedbank, have been announced. And a worthy list it is indeed.
The death toll from devastating floods in south-west Ethiopia soared to 364 on Wednesday, police said, bringing to almost 900 the number killed or missing in raging waters nationwide this month. Authorities said they feared for the worst and were preparing for the possibility that several hundred more may have drowned from weekend flooding.
Further work is required on the accrual accounting format that is being adopted by the South African government, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel said on Wednesday. He was replying to a question from official opposition Democratic Alliance finance spokesperson Ian Davidson.
A 50-year-old man is believed to have died from the rare anthrax disease, British health officials said on Wednesday, in the first apparent case in Scotland in nearly 20 years. The man, who lived in the Scottish Borders region, died on July 8 after a short illness and laboratory tests have shown that the disease is likely to have been the cause of death, health officials said.
The Law Society of Zimbabwe, an independent and self-regulating professional body of Zimbabwean lawyers, is under increasing attack by the government of Zimbabwe, according to Nicole Fritz, director of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre. She said two recent articles made plain the Zimbabwean government’s intention to clamp down on the law society.
Ethiopia braced on Wednesday for a sharp rise in the death toll from flash floods that have killed at least 455 people in the south and east of the country this month and have now spread north. As efforts continued to rescue up to 20 000 people marooned in the south and locate 250 missing in the east, new floods were reported north of the capital.
Flamboyant British entrepreneur Richard Branson’s Virgin Money has taken the South African credit-card market by storm — with more than 50 000 cards approved in the first six weeks of its entry into the country. In addition, the company has approved more than 20 000 car cards.