A school choirmaster who told a 14-year-old singer he wanted to be her "virgin breaker" has failed in his attempt to keep his job.

In January 2000, a wildfire torched about 8,800ha on Table Mountain and the urban edge, burning down 80 structures, each one surrounded by alien vegetation.

If you're among the 1.5 million South Africans who have recovered from Covid-19 but remain unwell, you are far from alone.

India's coronavirus infections rose by 346,786 overnight, the health ministry said on Saturday, setting a new world record for the third consecutive day, as overwhelmed hospitals in the densely-populated country begged for oxygen supplies.

The N1 highway in Johannesburg was closed for hours on Friday after an accident involving a gas tanker and vehicles.

A  Zimbabwean air force helicopter crashed into a residential area in Arcturus, 32km east of the capital Harare, on Friday killing its three crew members and a child on the ground.

Coronavirus vaccines remain out of reach in the poorest countries, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a report on Friday, marking the first anniversary of the COVAX dose-sharing facility.

One of the Oxford scientists who co-developed AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine defended its safety on Friday and said he was not worried that some countries had opted to restrict its use amid concerns about a possible link to very rare side effects.

Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said on Friday he would start gradually ending a hunger strike after getting medical care, even as the political prospects for him and his movement darkened.

Advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday are considering if it is safe to resume injections of Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine, even as senior US health officials prepare for a green light.

An Air Force of Zimbabwe helicopter crashed on Friday, killing three crew members and a child on the ground as it came down on a house, the Air Force said in a statement.

An attacker fatally stabbed a female police administrative worker in broad daylight on Friday at the entrance to a police station in a middle-class commuter town outside Paris.

Merchant vessels and a charity ship searching the Mediterranean for boats carrying migrants has found 10 bodies floating near a capsized rubber boat believed to have had 130 people on board, French humanitarian organisation SOS Mediterranee said.

French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to late Chadian President Idriss Deby at his funeral on Friday and said Paris would not let anybody threaten the stability and integrity of its former colony as it made a transition to democracy.

The story of Shaninlea Visser touched people's hearts when she lost her hands, feet, nose, lips and tip of her tongue to sepsis after she was bitten by a mongoose in 2017.

Tanzania has asked fishermen to avoid going into the ocean off the coast of its commercial capital Dar es Salaam and its southern Mtwara region ahead of the landing of Tropical Cyclone Jobo on Sunday, a senior official said on Friday.

A sharp rise in gender-based violence in Kenya during the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted an urgent need for more shelters to help victims and awareness campaigns, women's rights groups said on Friday.

Gunmen have shot dead three students they abducted from a northern Nigerian university, a state security official said on Friday, though the kidnappers still hold an unknown number of captives.

Rescue teams were battling against time on Friday to find a missing Indonesian Navy submarine lost in the Bali Sea with 53 crew, which would be rapidly running out of oxygen if not already crushed by water pressure.

UK Club, an insurer of the Ever Given cargo ship which ran aground in the Suez Canal in March, said on Friday it had filed an appeal in an Egyptian court over the detention of the vessel by authorities.

A Sudanese minister said on Friday that Ethiopia had rejected an invitation to a summit to discuss stalled negotiations over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and threatened to go to international arbitration to resolve their differences.

During their first week behind bars a snake was spotted dangling from the roof of their cell.

The JSE has fired Ntuthuko Shoba, the alleged mastermind of the murder of his heavily pregnant lover Tshegofatso Pule.

People scrambled for life-saving oxygen supplies across India on Friday and patients lay dying outside hospitals as the capital recorded the equivalent of one death from Covid-19 every five minutes.

Absa's Punki Modise has been appointed as the interim FD of the financial institution, the bank said on Tuesday, after Jason Quinn stepped into the interim CEO position this week.

Britain is getting control of the Covid-19 pandemic as case numbers fall and vaccines are rolled out, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday, adding that he would stick to a cautious plan for easing lockdown restrictions.

A total of 751 fake ladies' perfumes were seized.

South Africa plans to lift the licensing threshold for small-scale power generation projects to 10 megawatts (MW) from 1MW, a government notice showed on Friday, giving a boost to firms anxious to curb their reliance on ailing state utility Eskom.

The Qiniselani Manyuswa Traditional Council is concerned that the abduction of acting chief Makhosandile Ngcobo could widen family cracks that have long plagued them over a succession.

A failed attempt to access the safe in a bread delivery truck saw a gang of KwaZulu-Natal criminals instead hand out 240 loaves of bread to people in Mawothi, north of Durban, on Friday.