Daily News Channel
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday called the death of Neda Agha-Soltan "suspicious" and urged the country’s authorities to identify those responsible for it, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported Monday. The 26-year-old’s death has come to symbolize Iranian resistance to the government’s official election results since it was captured on amateur video. Within hours of its being posted online June 20, she had become the iconic victim of the Iranian government crackdown
The woman whose death has come to symbolize Iranian resistance to the government’s official election results did not die the way the opposition claims, government-backed Press TV said Sunday. Two people told Press TV there were no security forces in the area when Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, was killed on June 20. Neda’s death was captured on amateur video — most likely by a cell phone — and posted online.
The young woman who last weekend emerged as a powerful symbol of opposition to the Iranian government embraced life in many ways, but there was little about her that would have led her friends to predict she would become a martyr, one of them told CNN. Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, rose to prominence within hours after a crudely shot video documenting her final moments was uploaded to the Web shortly after she died Saturday from a single gunshot wound to the chest.
Observers have quipped that the greatest mystery surrounding South Africa’s presidential elections this week was not the identity of the victor — Jacob Zuma had the job sewn up when he seized control of the country’s ruling party in 2007 — but rather his first lady. Zuma, who will almost certainly be confirmed in the coming days, is an unabashed polygamist. That’s just one of the personal quirks causing some foreigners to shudder at the prospect of Zuma assuming control of one of Africa’s most successful democracies
The family history of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath took another tragic turn Monday when it was revealed that their son had committed suicide after battling depression. Nicholas Hughes, whose mother gassed herself in 1963 at her London home while her two children slept in the next room, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, his sister Frieda told The Times newspaper. Hughes, 47, was unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a marine biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks