Two men survived a light aircraft crash in the Cape Point section of the Table Mountain National Park in Cape Town on Thursday.
SA National Parks said the two occupants were taken to hospital for further examination.
Their plane crashed at around 13:40 along Link Road.
The circumstances around the incident are unknown.
The Western Cape government's emergency services said the plane crash-landed.
Link and Olifantsbos roads in Cape Point has been closed until further notice.
Russia’s EU ambassador has told the BBC his country still believes diplomacy can help de-escalate the crisis over Ukraine.
Vladimir Chizhov said Moscow had no intention of invading anybody, but warned it was important not to provoke Russia into changing its mind.
It comes after a flurry of diplomatic activity on Monday and Tuesday.
Russia has repeatedly denied any plans to invade Ukraine.
But with well over 100,000 troops massed near the Ukrainian border, some Western countries including the US have warned that a Russian attack could come at any time.
In 2014 Russia annexed Ukraine’s southern Crimea peninsula. Since then there has been a long-running conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists control swathes of territory and at least 14,000 people have been killed.
After two days of intense diplomacy led by French President Emmanuel Macron, there is some suggestion that a renewed focus on the so-called Minsk agreements – which sought to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine – could be used as a basis to defuse the current crisis.
Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany backed the accords in 2014-15.
Some diplomats agree that the agreements could offer a route to de-escalation, with France’s ambassador to the United States, Philippe Etienne, tweeting they should be used to “build a viable political solution”.
President Macron said talks would be revived as early as Thursday and include Russia and Ukraine along with France and Germany – known as the Normandy quartet.
Mr Chizhov did not say whether Russia planned to move troops away from Russia’s border with Ukraine, and instead asked why no-one was talking about the number of Ukrainian soldiers directly facing Russia.
But he was clear that further talks could still produce results.
“We certainly believe there is still room for diplomacy,” he told the BBC’s Europe Editor Katya Adler.
Russia has made a series of demands to the West over European security, including a guarantee that Ukraine never becomes a member of the West’s defensive military alliance, Nato.
This demand has been flatly rejected, with Western countries insisting that only Ukraine can make decisions about its own security arrangements.
But Russia’s EU ambassador made clear that Russia still saw Nato’s eastern expansion as a key point in any negotiation.
“We are not going to forget it. And we cannot afford to forget it. Five waves of Nato expansion, that was not the evolution that we expected,” Mr Chizhov told the BBC.
The envoy’s apparent optimism for continued talks followed two days of frenzied diplomacy from European leaders seeking to end Russia’s military escalation.
French President Emmanuel Macron has been at the forefront of those efforts, visiting Moscow, Kyiv and Berlin.
After his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Tuesday, Mr Macron said both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders had recommitted to implementing the Minsk peace agreements.
President Zelensky has in the past criticised the agreement, which was signed by his predecessor, saying that it gives too much away to the rebel groups which control parts of Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Moscow has long accused the Ukrainian government of failing to implement the agreements, and at Monday’s news conference the Russian president urged Ukraine to respect them: “Like it or not, my beauty, you have to put up with it,” Mr Putin said.
On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that there were “positive signals that a solution to Ukraine could be based only on fulfilling the Minsk agreements”.
However, Ukraine and Russia disagree over what the agreements mean in practice, and Kyiv fears that the accords would give too much autonomy to the eastern regions currently under rebel control, with Moscow retaining significant influence there.
At a meeting in Berlin on Tuesday, the leaders of France, Germany and Poland backed the Minsk agreements and reaffirmed their support for Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Meanwhile thousands of Russian troops are due to take part in military exercises that start in Belarus on Thursday, in a further escalation of tensions close to Ukraine’s borders.
Belarus is a close ally of Russia and Nato has warned as many as 30,000 Russian troops could take part.
The Kremlin spokesman admitted the joint drills were serious but he pointed out the nature of threats was higher than before. Mr Chizhov told the BBC that Russian troops currently stationed in Belarus would return to their permanent bases.
He also repeated Russia’s insistence that it had no intention of invading anybody, but added that “the important thing is not to provoke Russia into changing its mind”.
A manhunt is under way in Pakistan for a faith healer who allegedly hammered a nail into a pregnant woman’s head.
The woman arrived at a hospital in Peshawar after trying to extract the 5cm (two-inch) nail with pliers.
Initially, she told doctors that she had carried out the act herself, but later admitted a faith healer who had claimed he could guarantee she gave birth to a baby boy was responsible.
Police began investigating after x-ray images of the injury appeared online.
Dr Haider Khan, a staff member at the Lady Reading Hospital, said the woman was “fully conscious, but was in immense pain,” when she arrived seeking treatment.
Staff at the hospital told the local Dawn newspaper that the woman had approached the faith healer after hearing about the practice from a neighbour.
They added that the woman was mother to three daughters, and that her husband had threatened to leave her if she gave birth to another girl.
“She is three months pregnant and because of her husband’s fear she went to the faith healer,” hospital staff told Dawn.
In some poorer south-Asian countries, a son is often believed to offer better long-term financial security to parents than daughters do, and this gives rise to exploitative practices, often from so-called “faith healers”.
Faith healers are relatively common in some parts of Pakistan, particularly in north-western tribal areas. Their practices are grounded in Sufi lore, sometimes described as a form of Islamic mysticism.
Their activities are banned in many schools of Islam.
In a tweet issued on Tuesday, Peshawar police chief Abbas Ahsan said that a special investigative team had been formed to “bring to justice the fake peer (faith healer) who played with the life of an innocent woman and put a nail in her head with [the] false promise of a male child”.
Police have spent several days interviewing hospital staff and trying to track down the woman, who left the hospital after staff had removed the nail from her head, in the hope that she can help them identify the man.
“We will soon lay our hands on the sorcerer,” Mr Ahsan said.
Mr Ahsan also said that his officers will be examining why the staff failed to report the incident to police when the woman first presented at the hospital.
Minister for Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu has revealed Ghana has been named as one of two countries globally getting the COVID-19 fight right.
Per a World Health Organisation (WHO) assessment, Ghana and South Korea are the only two countries doing right in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to him, this achievement is an indication of the high-level innovation of the Presidency and the Ministry.
With this recognition, the country constantly receives invitations from other states to share their knowledge and tactics in fighting the pandemic.
To him, “we’ve fought the battle and we’ve not won it yet but we can say we’re out of the woods.”
He noted that presently Ghana has 5 severe cases with 2 persons in critical situations nationwide.
“Our active case count is 527, we have lost 1,426 lives. Although this is not what we expected, but compared to the thousands of deaths elsewhere, I will say we have been successful,” he submitted at the Minister’s Press Briefing organized by the Information Ministry.
Ghana was pressured with hospital beds and Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Minister disclosed “as at last week we had only one person on a ventilator nationwide. Positivity rate is low and I believe the media and everyone needs to give credit to the President and the Ministry.”
He applauded the President for his direct involvement in the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines and active involvement in all meetings related to the fight against the pandemic.
Kwaku Agyeman-Manu also applauded health workers for their involvement in testing, contact tracing, mass education and vaccination drives.
Military prosecutors have called for a 30-year jail term against Burkina Faso’s former president Blaise Compaoré for the 1987 murder of his predecessor, revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara.
The closely-followed trial taking place in Ouagadougou is nearing a climax as the Burkina Faso continues to falter from its latest coup d’état, following popular anger over jihadist attacks in the country.
On Tuesday, prosecutors asked the military court in the capital to find Compaoré, who fled to Côte d’Ivoire in 2014, guilty on several counts.
Accused of masterminding the assassination, Compaoré is being tried in absentia on charges of attacking state security, concealing a corpse and complicity in a murder.
At the request of the defence, the trial has been adjourned until 1 March.
Revered among African radicals, Thomas Sankara was an army captain aged just 33 when he came to power in a coup in 1983.
The Marxist-Leninist fire-brand railed against imperialism and colonialism, often angering Western leaders but gained followers across the continent and beyond.
He and 12 of his colleagues were gunned down by a hit squad on 15 October, 1987 at a meeting of the ruling National Revolutionary Council.
Their assassination coincided with a coup that brought Sankara’s former comrade-in-arms, Compaoré, to power.
Compaoré went on to rule Burkina Faso for 27 years before being deposed by a popular uprising in 2014 and fleeing to neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire.
Fourteen people stand accused in the trial, 12 of them appearing in court.
Most have pleaded not guilty.
The prosecution has also requested 30 years in jail for the commander of Compaoré’s presidential guard, Hyacinthe Kafando, who is suspected of having led the hit squad. He is also being tried in absentia.
It sought a 20-year sentence for Gilbert Diendere, one of the commanders of the army during the 1987 coup and the main defendant present at the trial.
He is already serving a 20-year sentence over an attempted military coup in 2015.
Mariam Sankara, the slain ex-president’s wife, welcomed the prosecution’s plea.
“We’ve been waiting for years,” she said.
Now “we’re waiting for the final verdict.”
In its closing statement on Tuesday, the prosecution recounted the day Sankara was killed.
It read that when Sankara headed to the National Revolutionary Council meeting, “his executioners were already there”.
According to the prosecution’s version of events, once Sankara entered the meeting room, the hit squad burst in, killing his guards.
“The squad then ordered president Sankara and his colleagues to leave the room. They would then be killed one by one,” the prosecution said.
The prosecution also urged prison sentences ranging from three to 20 years for five other defendants, as well as an 11-year suspended sentence for another.
It has however sought the acquittal of three of the accused because of lack of evidence and the expiration of a statute of limitations.
The trial was already briefly suspended after the 24 January the elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore was overthrown by the military.
The trial resumed last week when coup leader Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba restored the constitution.
The UN’s deputy chief has expressed optimism about talks between the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan rebels.
“We are certainly in [a] much better place and there’s much more conversation,” Amina Mohammed said after returning from war-torn regions of Tigray, Amhara and Afar.
“There’s certainly less hostility than there was a few months ago.”
Ms Mohammed was accompanied on the trip by the African Union’s mediator, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.
The UN’s deputy secretary general was talking to journalists in the capital, Addis Ababa, at the end of her visit to Ethiopia. She came to attend the AU summit over the weekend.
During her stay she met the authorities and the leadership of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has been at war with government forces for more than a year.
Ms Mohammed reiterated calls for a cessation of hostilities.
The conflict has forced millions of people to flee their homes and the UN says nearly 40% of people in Tigray are suffering from an extreme lack of food.
The Central African Republic’s prime minister has been sacked against the backdrop of tensions between pro-Russian and pro-French factions within the government in Bangui.
Henri-Marie Dondra was named prime minister in June 2021, shortly after Paris froze budgetary aid to Bangui, accusing it of “complicity” in what Paris called a Russian “disinformation” campaign against the country’s former colonial ruler France.
According to a spokesman for the Presidency, Dondra was reportedly “fired” and replaced by his economy minister, Felix Moloua, confirming a weekend report by online news website Africa Intelligence.
The move came as CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadera was attending an African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
Moloua, a Touadera loyalist and a technocrat, was sworn-in as prime minister earlier this Wednesday.
Moscow’s importance in the Central African Republic has increased steadily over the past four years.
In 2020 Russian military contractors alongside Rwandan troops were called upon to subdue a rebellion against Touadera.
With their help, CAR government forces recaptured as much as two-thirds of the country – and several major towns – that had fallen under rebel control.
At the time of Dondra’s appointment as prime minister he was perceived as more “pro-French” than his predecessor Firmin Ngrebada, seen as more sympathetic to Moscow.
Mineral-rich but rated the world’s second-poorest country according to the UN’s Human Development Index, the CAR has been chronically unstable since independence 60 years ago.
A civil war broke out in 2013, pitting multiple militia groups against a state on the verge of collapse, leaving thousands of people dead and forcing more than a quarter of the 5 million population to flee their homes.
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