Briefs

For South Africa, 'a new beginning'

JOHANNESBURG - What's next for South Africa?

This racially charged country that, on Nelson Mandela's watch, inspired the world by embracing reconciliation in all-race elections in 1994 is again in the global spotlight after the loss of such a towering historical figure. It is a time not just for grief and gratitude, but also a clear-eyed assessment of national strengths and shortcomings in a future without a man who was a guide and comfort to so many.

"It's a new beginning," said Kyle Redford, one of many outside the home of the anti-apartheid leader who became the nation's first black president. "The loss of a legend is going to force us to come together once again."

He acknowledged that there is a "sense of what next: Where do we go? What do we do? And how do we do it?"

Maya Angelou mourns Mandela as longtime friend

NEW YORK - Maya Angelou, who first met Nelson Mandela in the early 1960s, praised him as a great man worthy of comparison to another icon she knew - the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Our planet has lost a friend," Angelou said yesterday. She was living in Egypt with a South African activist when Mandela visited them. She remembered him as handsome and funny and unusually generous with compliments, able to get along with the varying groups of political opponents to South Africa's apartheid regime. He was imprisoned in 1964, but their friendship resumed in the 1990s after his release.

Memorial planned at U.S. National Cathedral

WASHINGTON - A memorial is being planned for 11 a.m. Wednesday at the Washington National Cathedral.

The National Cathedral has frequently served as a gathering place for mourners. It hosted funeral services for former U.S. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. In 2012 it was the location for a memorial for astronaut Neil Armstrong.

- Daily News wire reports