A 24-year-old man from Southampton, England, was banned from contacting his parents for five years after they got so fed up with his constant pestering for money that they got a restraining order against him.

Zimbabwe's main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has died in South Africa, a senior official in his MDC party has said.

President Jacob Zuma resigned as leader of South Africa on Wednesday evening during a televised address to the nation.

All too often girls in countries across sub-Saharan Africa can be married off an early age, trapping them in a cycle that is almost impossible to escape.

They can be held by poverty, sexual and domestic violence, and social stigma.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa has arrived in the country for a one-day working visit.

The special aircraft carrying President Mnangagwa touched down at 09:35hrs and later inspected a quarter guard.

President Mnangagwa was welcomed at the Kenneth Kaunda International Airport (KKIA) by Foreign Affairs Minister Joseph Malanji.

Mr. Mnangagwa is currently paying courtesy calls on all SADC leaders after taking over power from Robert Mugabe.

President Mnangagwa visited South Africa last month and met with President Jacob Zuma and was recently in Angola to meet that country’s President Joao Lourenco.

Earlier, Foreign Affairs Minister Joseph Malanji said Zambia and Zimbabwe have a lot in common and that the two countries are working on further deepening the existing cordial relations between them.

Zambia and Zimbabwe share special bilateral relations and have continued to grow.

President Mnangagwa is expected to lay wreaths at the Presidential Burial site at the Embassy Park.

He is later expected to pay a courtesy call on President Edgar Lungu where the two are expected to have open talks.

President Mnangagwa is expected to leave the country at 16 hours Zambian time.

It was September of 2004, when Mary Grams, of Alberta, Canada, lost her diamond-encrusted engagement ring, while working on her family farm. She spent days looking for it, but to no avail. 

Last week, nearly 13 years later, her daughter in law plucked a weird-looking carrot from the garden, with a diamond ring tightly wrapped around it.

“I went to the garden for something and I saw this long weed. For some reason, I picked it up and it must have caught on something and pulled [the ring] off,” 84-year-old Mary Grams recalls about the day she lost her engagement ring, in 2004.

She had worn it on her finger since 1951, a year before she married her husband, Norman. “We looked high and low on our hands and knees. We couldn’t find it. I thought for sure either they rototilled it or something happened to it.”

Mary never told her husband that she lost the ring. Instead, she went and bought herself a similar-looking ring, in hopes that he wouldn’t notice it was missing. “I didn’t tell him, even, because I thought for sure he’d give me heck or something,” the woman told CBC Canada.



At one point, Mary and her family moved to Camrose, but they still maintain a garden at the old farm, near Armena, which has been in her family for 105 years. About a week ago, as her daughter in law was plucking carrots from the garden, she noticed a really misshapen one that looked like a big fat finger wearing a very tight ring. It turned out that the vegetable was actually wearing a ring.

I knew it had to belong to either grandma or my mother-in-law, because no other women have lived on that farm,” Colleen Daley told reporters. “I asked my husband if he recognized the ring. And he said yeah. His mother had lost her engagement ring years ago in the garden and never found it again. And it turned up on this carrot.”

“If you look at it, it grew perfectly around the [ring]. It was pretty weird looking,” Daley added. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It was quite interesting.”



Mary Grams was obviously ecstatic to get her old piece of jewelry back, and she intends to put it back on her finger, where it belongs. “I’m going to wear it because it still fits,” she said.

Believe it or not, this is not the first time this has happened. Back in 2011, a Swedish woman also made news headlines after finding a ring she had lost 16 years prior wrapped around a carrot in her garden. So if you ever lose round jewelry in your garden, a good way to find it is to plant carrots.

Source: oddity central

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari has returned home after three months of medical leave in the UK.

Officials refused to disclose what he was being treated for.

It was the president's second spell of medical leave this year - leading many Nigerians to question whether he was well enough to run the country.

President Buhari, 74, walked unaided from the plane after landing in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

He was greeted by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who has acted as interim leader, and was accorded a military salute.

He made no statement and immediately travelled to the presidential villa.

President Buhari, who took office in May 2015, handed over power to Vice President Osinbajo to allay concerns of a void at the helm of Africa's biggest economy.

His absence sparked numerous protests, including demands that he should resign, as well as calls for more transparency about the president's condition.

There has been speculation about his health since June 2016, when he first went to London for treatment of what his aides said was a persistent ear infection.

His spokesman said he will address Nigerians on Monday morning.

Source: BBC

A 10-year-old rape victim who was denied permission for an abortion by the Indian Supreme Court last month has given birth to a baby girl.

The girl is not aware that she has given birth. During her pregnancy she was told her bulge was because she had a big stone in her stomach.

The baby weighing 2.5kg (5.5lb) was delivered by Caesarean section in Chandigarh at 09:22 (03:52 GMT).

Both the mother and the newborn are doing fine, an official told the BBC.

The girl alleges she was raped several times in the past seven months by her uncle, who has been arrested.

Her pregnancy was discovered in mid-July when she complained of stomach ache and her parents took her to hospital.

A local court in Chandigarh turned down the abortion plea on the grounds that she was too far into her pregnancy after a doctors’ panel said that termination of the pregnancy would be “too risky”. Later, the Supreme Court also refused to allow an abortion for her on similar grounds.

Baby ‘to be put up for adoption’

As the baby has been born prematurely at 35 weeks, she has been placed in the neo-natal intensive care unit of the hospital where she will remain for the next few days, the BBC’s Geeta Pandey reports from Delhi.

The parents of the 10-year-old, who had said right from the start that they did not want to have anything to do with the baby, did not even look at the newborn, our correspondent adds.

The infant will be looked after by the child welfare committee until she is put up for adoption, an official said.

The 10-year-old is expected to remain in hospital for a week to 10 days.

The girl’s case has dominated headlines in India for the past several weeks, with officials saying this is the first-ever case of a child so young giving birth.

Indian law does not allow terminations after 20 weeks unless doctors certify that the mother’s life is in danger.

But in recent years, the courts have received several petitions, many from child rape survivors, seeking to terminate pregnancies after 20 weeks. In most cases, these pregnancies are discovered late because the children themselves are not aware of their condition.

Child welfare activists who interact with the 10-year-old on a regular basis say that is precisely what happened with her – the girl is very innocent and had no idea what had happened to her.

Her parents also missed the telltale signs of her pregnancy perhaps because she’s “a healthy, chubby child”. Besides, they couldn’t imagine that their daughter could be pregnant at 10.

Source: BBC

At least 179 people have been killed in a mudslide near Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, the Red Cross says.

A hillside in the Regent area collapsed early on Monday following heavy rains, leaving many houses covered in mud.

A BBC reporter at the scene says many people may have been asleep when the mudslide occurred.

Sierra Leone's Vice-President Victor Bockarie Foh said it was "likely that hundreds are lying dead". The total number of casualties is likely to rise.

Mr Foh told Reuters news agency that the disaster was "so serious that I myself feel broken". He said that the area was being cordoned off as people were being evacuated, including many still feared trapped in their homes.

A spokesman for the Red Cross, Abubakarr Tarawallie, told the BBC that 179 bodies had been taken to the central morgue in Freetown.

Mr Tarawallie said the organisation's volunteers and staff were involved in search and rescue operations and that people affected were in immediate need of shelter and blankets.

He added that at least 100 properties had been submerged and that some had collapsed after a section of Sugar Loaf mountain came down at around 06:00 GMT.

The AFP news agency is reporting that the total death toll from flooding in the capital has risen to 312, citing another Red Cross spokesperson.

Hundreds of people are likely to be left homeless following the mudslide.

A Sierra Leonean disaster management official, Candy Rogers, said that "over 2,000 people are homeless" as a result of the mudslide in the Regent area, AFP reports.

Mr Rogers said that a huge humanitarian effort will be required to deal with the aftermath of the flooding.

Source: dailygraphiconline.com

Kenya's opposition leader has urged people to stay away from work on Monday over the disputed election result.

Raila Odinga said it would be a "day of mourning for the fallen patriots" after a rally in Kibera, the largest slum in the capital Nairobi.

The international community has urged calm following the election, which Mr Odinga alleges was fixed.

But after Mr Odinga spoke on Sunday, renewed violence broke out between his supporters and their opponents.

Police fired tear gas in Mathare - a slum where Mr Odinga met the family of a nine-year-old girl shot by a stray bullet.

AFP is reporting at least 16 people were killed between Friday evening and Saturday night. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said on Saturday 24 people had been shot dead during protests since election day on 8 August.

It is unclear how much these two figures overlap.

In a tweet sent after the rally, Mr Odinga said they had died at the hands of "Jubilee mandated death squads", referring to Mr Kenyata's party.

A man was also killed in Kisumu county, an opposition stronghold and the centre of post-election ethnic violence in 2007, when 1,200 people died and 600,000 were displaced.

"This is a failed regime that is resorting to killing people instead of addressing the real issue. The vote was stolen. There's no secret about that," Mr Odinga told the 4,000 people who had gathered to hear him talk on Sunday.

The official results gave President Uhuru Kenyatta 54.3%, and Mr Odinga 44.7%.

He added: "We had predicted they will steal the election and that's what happened. We are not done yet. We will not give up. Wait for the next course of action which I will announce the day after tomorrow.

"But for now I want to tell you not to go to work tomorrow (Monday)."

The BBC's reporter in Nairobi said his claims were contrary to reports from both local and international observers that the poll was free and fair.

European Union foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan are among those who have urged Mr Odinga to seek redress through the courts - something the opposition coalition says is not an option.

The Elections Observation Group (Elog), which had 8,300 observers, said its projected outcome put Mr Kenyatta on 54%, just short of the official figure of 54.3%.

Source:  BBC