Johannesburg, South Africa | AFP | President Jacob Zuma will not attend the funeral on Wednesday of celebrated South African anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada, who in recent years had become fiercely critical of the government. While most of the country’s leadership will be present, Kathrada’s family asked Zuma to skip the …
Read More »Tributes flood in for S.African anti-apartheid icon Kathrada
Johannesburg, South Africa | AFP | Celebrated South African anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada, one of Nelson Mandela’s closest colleagues in the struggle against white rule and a fellow Robben Island prisoner, died Tuesday aged 87. Kathrada was among those tried and jailed alongside Mandela in the 1964 Rivonia trial, which …
Read More »What’s your poison? A history of killing with chemistry
Bangkok, Thailand | AFP | From the courtiers of Ancient Greece to Soviet spies and maybe now North Korean agents, poison has a long history as a weapon of murder, favoured by assassins for its stealthy delivery of the fatal blow. The killing of Kim Jong-Nam, the half-brother of the …
Read More »WWII bomb forces 54,000 Germans from homes on Xmas
Berlin, Germany | AFP | An unexploded British bomb from World War Two forced 54,000 people out of their homes in Germany on Christmas Day, the country’s biggest such evacuation since the end of hostilities. The huge operation on Sunday in the southern city of Augsburg took 11 hours, involved …
Read More »The secret world of Japan’s hidden Christians
Ikitsuki, Japan | AFP | Japanese rice farmer Masatsugu Tanimoto doesn’t think of himself as a Christian, and you’d almost never find him in a church. But every so often, he and others meet to recite prayers drawn from another time and place. The group, dressed in sober kimonos and …
Read More »Exhumed bodies reveal South Africa’s deep apartheid wounds
Pretoria, South Africa | AFP | After 52 years, Mncedisi Tyopo finally stood beside his father’s grave, looking down at remains being exhumed as part of South Africa’s attempts to come to terms with its painful past. Tyopo’s father Bhonase Vulindlela was an anti-apartheid fighter who was hanged along with …
Read More »Early US astronauts faced uncertainty, danger and death
Miami, United States | AFP | John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, but for a solid hour of that journey, NASA feared he was about to die in a blazing fireball. In fact, all of the original crew of astronauts, known as the Mercury …
Read More »Remembering Abu Mayanja
COMMENT: By Kavuma-Kaggwa Remembering Abu Mayanja, a great man of our time One of Uganda’s great men and freedom fighters, Abubakar Kakyama Mayanja, died on November 4, 2005 at Mulago Hospital after a short illness. He was buried on November 5, 2005, at his ancestral home in Zziba village, Ngogwe …
Read More »‘Jesus’s tomb’ opened for first time in centuries
Jérusalem, Undefined | AFP | Preservation experts have opened for the first time in at least two centuries what Christians believe is Jesus’s tomb inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Some of the historic work was witnessed by AFP photographer Gali Tibbon who captured images of the …
Read More »US’ Patient Zero and the origins of the AIDS epidemic
Paris, France | AFP | A labelling error and reckless media hype in the 1980s led to unjustly branding a gay airline employee as “Patient Zero” in the US AIDS epidemic, scientific and historical sleuthing detailed Wednesday. The deadly virus, which has claimed more than 650,000 lives in the United …
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