| June 28, 2008 | - Robert Mugabe, ruler of Zimbabwe since 1980, was sworn in as president after he ran unopposed and won more than 85 percent of the popular vote, a percentage roughly equal to the national unemployment rate. He called for “unity” and invited former candidate and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to attend his inauguration. “This,” said a spokesman for Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), “is an unbelievable joke.” Mugabe supporters entered the house of an MDC councillor and shouted “Let's kill the baby” as they shattered the legs of his 11-month-old son, Blessing; a plan was discovered that called for 2 million MDC members to be “internally displaced”; and 3 million Zimbabweans were living in South Africa, where 62 people were killed in recent anti-immigration rioting.
| Source 1:
Times Online
Source 2:
AFP
Source 3:
CBS News
|
| January 31, 2008 | - Power failures in South Africa closed mines and shopping centers for several days.
| Source:
Power Failures Outrage South Africa
|
| December 11, 2007 | - Archbishop Desmond Tutu railed against the use of detention centers by the United States. “Whoever imagined that you would hear from America,” asked Tutu, “the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government?”
| Source:
news.com.au
|
| October 23, 2007 | - The $5-million African Leadership Prize, an award designed to encourage good governance in Africa, was awarded to former Mozambique president Joaquim Chissano, who ruled his country for 18 years before stepping down in 2005. “Those who govern badly,” said an analyst at the South African Institute of International Affairs, “bag a lot more than $5 million.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| October 4, 2007 | - Three thousand two hundred South African gold miners were rescued without injury after a power cable accident trapped them underground; the last group of miners emerged within 40 hours of the accident, dehydrated and exhausted, singing and stamping their feet.
| Source 1:
The Canadian Press
Source 2:
BBC
|
| September 27, 2007 | - Former South African President Nelson Mandela opened a shopping mall in Soweto.
| Source:
AP via Yahoo! News
|
| September 6, 2007 | - Archbishop Desmond Tutu became the patron of South Africa's Barbecue Day. “This,” he said, “is something that can unite us.”
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| September 5, 2007 | - Two women accused of casting spells on a South African school were burned to death by students on the school's football field.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| June 19, 2007 | - The South African education department announced that male students may be granted paternity leave.
- The South African education department announced that male students may be granted paternity leave.
| Source:
IOL/Cape Times
|
| April 6, 2007 | - A South African farmer received a 20-year sentence for killing a man he mistakenly believed to be a baboon.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 7, 2007 | - Desperate to protect themselves from crime, many South Africans were attending martial arts classes taught by Bruce Lee's top student, Grandmaster Richard Bustillo. “I was born in 1975 and Bruce died in 1973,” said one pupil. “He was a Chinese guy but maybe he came back as an African?”
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| November 20, 2006 | - Police in the Mpumalanga region of South Africa were looking for the owner of an unclaimed penis.
| Source:
METRO.co.uk
|
| November 12, 2006 | - Zama Ndebele, the wife of Premier S'bu Ndebele of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, promised to return her herd of Nguni cattle to the state in the wake of a cows-for-favors corruption scandal.
| Source 1:
Business Day
Source 2:
IOL
|
| August 30, 2006 | - Female condoms were becoming more popular in South Africa.
| Source:
Mail & Guardian
|
| August 19, 2006 | - In South Africa, Shlomo Goldwasser, father of an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hezbollah on July 12, urged the world to defeat his son's captors. “If Israel won't finish the job, you will find them here,” he said. “They will kidnap your sons.”
| Source:
Independent Online, South Africa
|
| June 7, 2006 | - The New York Times reported that tar-paper shacks have been selling briskly in South African shanty towns.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 16, 2006 | - A South African
ice cream company sprayed a ton of ammonia gas into the atmosphere, sending 100 schoolchildren to the hospital; afterwards, the company held an assembly for some of the children and gave them free ice cream. "They've been reading words like 'toxic' and 'poisonous' and obviously got quite a fright," said an engineer. "We want to enlighten them about how ammonia can be used constructively."
| Source:
Iol.co.za
|
| December 21, 2005 | - In South Africa a mugger running from security guards fled into a tiger enclosure, where he was mauled to death.
| Source:
SFGate.com
|
| December 1, 2005 | - A South African court ruled that same-sex marriage was constitutional.
| Source:
AP
|
| November 8, 2005 | - A South African woman crashed her car into an electrical substation, dislodging over a million bees, which then stung her to death.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 31, 2005 | - A South African woman tried to help a seal back into the sea only to have it bite off her nose.
| Source:
MSNBC
|
| October 6, 2005 | - It was also announced that a great white shark named for Nicole Kidman had been tracked as it swam from South Africa to Australia and back. “We suspect,” said a scientist, “that she went for reproductive reasons.”
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 30, 2005 | - A white South African farmer was sentenced to life in prison for killing one of his black employees and feeding the corpse to lions.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| August 8, 2005 | - One hundred thousand gold miners were on strike in South Africa.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 7, 2005 | - The United States sentenced a South African man to three years in jail for smuggling nuclear bomb parts to Pakistan and India.
| Source:
IOL.co.za
|
| August 4, 2005 | - Someone in South Africa was sodomizing corpses.
| Source:
IOL.co.za
|
| July 28, 2005 | - In Pinetown, South Africa, two little boys found a fetus without legs or a head; police said that they found no animal saliva on the fetus.
| Source:
The Mercury
|
| May 27, 2005 | - Pretoria, South Africa, changed its name to Tshwane, which means “we are the same.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 29, 2005 | - In South Africa, two men were convicted of feeding a coworker to lions.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 14, 2005 | - Zoo officials in Johannesburg, South Africa, were pressuring one of their chimps to stop smoking.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| March 2, 2005 | - In South Africa a goat adopted a baby rhino.
| Source:
NBC5
|
| January 3, 2005 | - and gun sales in South Africa were down.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| November 23, 2004 | - An elderly South African woman was eaten by a shark.
| Source:
CNN
|
| August 27, 2004 | - Sir Mark Thatcher, the 51-year-old son of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, was arrested in South Africa under suspicion of financing an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea.
| Source:
BBC, Telegraph
|
| July 29, 2004 | - Cemeteries in South Africa were recycling graves.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 22, 2004 | - A woman in South Africa
accidentally put a 100-year-old gold coin into a Cape Town parking meter.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 17, 2004 | - In South Africa, a man testified in court that he had killed an interior designer because she "did not make any nice comments about my place, so I went to my garage and fetched an axe."
| |
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