New York. — Facebook Inc investors including Accl Partners and Goldman Sachs raised the number of shares they are selling in the social network’s initial public offering, boosting the sale to as much as US$16 billion. Existing holders will offer 241,2 million shares, bringing the total on offer to 421,2 million, a regulatory filing yesterday showed. Accel, the biggest seller in

A 64-year-old woman has been arrested in the US after allegedly robbing the same bank three times. Datha Nation was arrested outside a Wells Fargo Bank in Denver earlier this week after clerks called police to report she was back. According to police, Nation approached tellers at the bank on June 9, 2011, with a note demanding cash and threatened to infect the clerk

LONDON — British prosecutors accused former Rupert Murdoch aide Rebekah Brooks and five others of obstructing justice yesterday in the first criminal charges from the News of the World phone hacking scandal. The ex-News International (NI) chief executive, her husband Charlie Brooks and four people who worked for her were charged with trying to hide evidence from

PARIS — Francois Hollande was sworn in as France’s first Socialist president since 1995 yesterday at a solemn ceremony overshadowed by the debt crisis threatening to unravel the eurozone. After brief ceremonies in Paris, the 57-year-old career politician was to dash to Berlin to confront Chancellor Angela Merkel over their very different visions as to how to save the

A retired Dutch Reformed church minister has been arrested for shoplifting herbal erection medication from a Pretoria pharmacy. The 60-year-old man paid a R500 admission of guilt fine at the Sinoville Police Station before being released. An employee at the Dischem pharmacy in Wonderboom Junction

A HUSBAND abstained from having sex with his wife for two years under the impression that his wife was suffering from cancer — and then got the shock of his life when she later gave birth. Thabo Mokgotsi* had feared that his wife Maria* was dying from cancer when an ostensibly cancerous growth turned out to

NEW YORK. — US President Barack Obama will not attend the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Vladivostok in September, which comes soon after the Democratic presidential nominating convention, the White House said yesterday.
The announcement by White House spokesman Jay Carney came days after Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would

COTONOU. — Several African leaders met in Cotonou yesterday to examine again the thorny issue of the election of a new chairman of the African Union Commission, a key post being contested by Gabon and South Africa. The one-day gathering was held to try to end the impasse after African leaders failed to choose between Gabon’s Jean Ping, who has held the post since

JOHANNESBURG. — A top Durban attorney and secretary of the commission of inquiry into the arms deal was found dead in the back seat of his car at his Pinetown home on Saturday afternoon, in what police believe was a suicide. Mvuseni Ngubane was shot once in the head. Ngubane had been involved in several high-profile cases, including representing convicted drug dealer

JOHANNESBURG. — South Africa’s renegade youth leader Julius Malema vowed yesterday that he would one day lead the African National Congress, despite his expulsion from the ruling party for indiscipline. “I’m going to lead the ANC. I will lead this ANC. It doesn’t matter what time it takes,” Malema told journalists in his first remarks since his expulsion last month. “We are not

LONDON. — The British town of Sandwich yesterday staged a dramatic re-enactment of the moment when the town’s earl was said to have invented the sandwich, to mark the 250th anniversary of the bread-based meal. Dressed in 18th century costume, actors recreated the night when John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich — a rapacious card-player — “called for a slice of