Train crushes railway sex couple

A couple in South Africa who were having sex on a railway track in Mpumalanga Province have been killed by a goods train, police say. Spokesman Abie Khoabane said it took place on Friday evening and the victims were yet to be identified. He told local newspapers that the couple ignored the driver’s shouts as he moved the train into the disused station in Kinross town. “They continued with their business,” he told the Sowetan paper. According to South Africa’s Beeld newspaper, the area was deserted with no cars or houses nearby. The man died at the scene and the woman died later at hospital, the Sowetan reports. The police have appealed for those with missing relatives to come forward to help with their investigation.

EU scrutinises Yahoo-Google deal

The deal will see Google’s adverts alongside Yahoo’s search results

The European Union has announced that it has been investigating the terms of Google’s proposed deal to partner with Yahoo for advertising.

The deal would see Google’s advertising programs built into Yahoo’s search engine in the US and Canada.

However, the EU Competition Commission argues that there are anti-trust implications because the two companies do business in Europe.

The EU’s present inquiry could escalate to a formal investigation.

The announcement follows on the heels of news of a similar anti-trust investigation by the US Department of Justice.

If it goes ahead, the partnership would control more than 80% of the online advertising market.

EU antitrust regulations have traditionally proven more strict than American ones, so the investigation could prove to be a significant stumbling block for the deal.

The World Association of Newspapers, which represents some 18,000 titles worldwide, joined the fray in opposing the deal on Monday.

“The reality is that a large portion of the traffic to most online newspapers’ websites today comes through paid search or natural results on search engines,” the group said in a statement.

“For this reason, competition among search engines is absolutely vital for newspapers – to ensure that no search engine can set monopoly prices for paid search ads, and to prevent any search engine from influencing users’ surfing habits by manipulating unpaid search results.”

Each advert will generate revenue for Google. However, there is considerable speculation that another motivation is to provide Yahoo with an alternative to Microsoft’s bid for a hostile takeover.

Both Yahoo and Google say that they are cooperating with investigators on both sides of the Atlantic, but argue that they will go ahead with the deal in October.

Popular comic strip ignites controversy

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — For most of our lives cartoonist Lynn Johnston has had us hanging on every plot twist and complication she could pack into 29 years of “For Better or For Worse.”

Lynn Johnston ended the original run of “For Better or For Worse” Sunday, but is now returning to the past.

Take one of the biggest, longest-running ones: Would Elizabeth, seriously challenged in picking men, finally dump that silly helicopter flyboy boyfriend of hers and just marry Anthony, for God’s sake? He’d been her sweetheart off and on since their grade-school days and had rescued her from the crazy would-be rapist she once worked with. So forget that the mustache Anthony grew in recent years made him look so much like a dork that even other comic strips began making fun of it. Life is, as Johnston would say, for better or for worse.

But then the cartoonist pulled the rug completely out from under us Sunday with a plot twist that made even the heartbreaking death of the Patterson family dog Farley (as he saved little April from drowning) seem pale in comparison. Even the comic strip that outraged readers by the thousands in 1993 when Lawrence acknowledged he was gay couldn’t top this.

There it was in full color in the big Sunday strip: As Elizabeth’s parents are dancing at her wedding (to Anthony, thank God) Johnston herself enters the strip in cartoon form and tells us that starting the next day “For Better or For Worse” will rocket back almost 30 years in time to soon after it began.

Elizabeth, now 27, would be a baby again. Michael, who loved to taunt his sister, calling her “Lizard Breath” when they were growing up, would be about grade-school age. On the positive side, family patriarch John Patterson would shed that pot belly he’d been growing in recent years and his wife, Elly, could finally put away all those anti-wrinkle products she’d been obsessing over for about the last decade.

And readers of some 2,000 newspaper comic sections would be left to scratch their heads and mutter, “What the … ”

“Interesting idea and it may very well work with the fan base that she’s got,” says Dave Strickler, a comic-strip fanatic who runs the Web site comicsaccess.com and has compiled a list of every comic strip syndicated in the United States from 1924 to 1995.

Strickler, like other fans of the strip, complains that it has gotten a little too sentimental in recent years, with Johnston concentrating too much on the philosophical musings she is famous for saving until the final panel and not enough on the story line.

At the same time, he says, the strip has grown to include so many characters that it was getting hard to tell them apart. He would sometimes mistake Elizabeth for her younger sister, April, or even her mother, Elly. (Those anti-wrinkle products must really be working!)

“If she goes back to the original art and carries on with the wit she’s capable of, there’s no reason to believe current fans won’t be loyal and new fans won’t enjoy it as well,” he said of the change.

For the time being, fans are left to try to figure out what would have happened to the gang had they kept on aging.

Johnston did tie up some loose ends in that last strip, explaining that Michael, who nearly died a few years ago when he ran into a burning apartment to save the manuscript of his Great Canadian Novel (the comic strip is set in Johnston’s native Canada) has gone on to publish four books and sign a movie deal.

Ailing Grandpa Jim, she said, would live long enough to hold Elizabeth’s first baby before dying at age 89.

Barely able to speak after suffering a stroke, Jim still managed to think one of the strip’s better quips last month when, after seeing the bride and groom rush into his hospital room straight from their wedding, he declared their act “a classic case of hitch and run.”

Whether editors will embrace the strip or cut and run remains to be seen.

About 2 percent of the 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada that carry “For Better or For Worse,” canceled when Johnston changed things from a real-time serial to a daily comic set in a fixed time, Universal Press Syndicate spokeswoman Kathie Kerr said Wednesday.

For some of the newspapers that did, reaction was swift.

Kathy Lu, features editor at The Roanoke (Virginia) Times said about 100 people e-mailed or phoned over the next two days, most of them unhappy.

“It felt like we were just going to be doing the same thing over again, even though she said she was going to be drawing some new stories,” Lu said of deciding not to continue the strip.

It was an argument die-hard fans weren’t buying.

Although Johnston has said that from this point the strips will be about a 50-50 mix of “classic” repeats and what she calls “new-runs” that will be drawn in the old style and set in the previous time but involve new stories, one man told Lu he wouldn’t care if every strip was old.

“He said, ‘It’s like watching ‘(The) Andy Griffith (Show),’ ” she said of the 1960s sitcom still in reruns. “He said, ‘I watch that show over and over again.’ ”

In an interview she recently posted on YouTube, Johnston said she was aware of fans’ concerns and hoped they would “hang in there with me and see what I do because it’s never been done before.”

In recent years, she has talked of simply ending the strip when the time came or of handing it off to someone else. She indicated in the YouTube interview that splitting with her husband of more than 30 years last year prompted her to abandon those plans.

“I never thought I’d be single at this time in my life,” the 61-year-old artist said. “And with that in mind, I still want to work. I still want to keep my hand in it.”

Nigerian man to divorce 82 wives

Mr Bello Abubakar challenged Muslim scholars two weeks ago

A Nigerian religious leader with 86 wives has accepted an Islamic decree ordering him to divorce all but four of them, local authorities say.

A spokesman for the emir of Bida told that Mohammadu Bello Abubakar, 84, agreed on Saturday to comply with the decree.

Last week one of Nigeria’s top Islamic bodies, the Jamatu Nasril Islam, sentenced him to death.

The sentence was lifted but he was threatened with eviction from his home.

Earlier, Mr Abubakar had challenged Islamic scholars, saying there was no punishment stated in the Koran for having more than four wives.

“I have not contravened any established law that would warrant my being banished from the land… There is no law that says one must not marry more than four wives,” the AFP news agency reported him as saying.

Many of the wives live three to a room, some have seven children

“All my wives are with children and some of these are people I have married and stayed with for over 30 years. How can they expect me to leave them within two days?” he reportedly told local newspapers.

The former teacher and Islamic preacher lives in Niger State with his wives and at least 170 children.

Niger is one of the Muslim majority states to have reintroduced Sharia punishments since 2000.

Several people have been sentenced to death for adultery by Sharia courts but none of these sentences have been carried out.