Athletics South Africa (ASA) has denied that athletes Louis van Zyl and Alwyn Myburgh absconded from Team SA at the All Africa Games in Algiers last week. ”We knew they were going to compete in Monaco but there is no question of them absconding from the South African team,” said ASA president Leonard Chuene on Friday.
Baby-killer Dina Rodrigues and her four co-accused were on Friday granted permission to appeal against their sentences. Cape High Court Judge Basheer Waglay, however, rejected applications by Rodrigues and three of the men to appeal against their convictions.
Hundreds of Islamists occupied Pakistan’s Red Mosque on Friday, painting the walls in their original colour and wrecking the official reopening of the complex after a bloody army assault on militants. Protesters chased out a government-appointed religious elder who was meant to lead the first Friday prayers at the Islamabad mosque since the military operation there earlier this month.
Somehow, ever since he moved into an idyllic villa on the shores of Lake Como, nothing has really gone right for George Clooney. His purchase of Villa Oleandra — for almost €12-million — led to a reported bust-up in 2002 with his agent over commission on the property.
Cape Town mayoral committee member Simon Grindrod plans to sue alleged ”sex blogger” Juan Uys, he said on Friday. Uys, arrested in Kroonstad last week, is to appear in the Cape Town magistrate’s court on Monday on a charge of theft dating back to 2004.
Mozambique’s state-run railway company said on Friday it was investing -million to upgrade its fleet in a move to cut -million in wagon hiring fees charged by rail freight firm Spoornet. CFM, which operates the African nation’s railways and ports, plans to refurbish 820 refurbished wagons with the investment.
Billed as the biggest change in the way viewers watch television in 40 years, the BBC launched an online service on Friday that allows people to download many programmes from the last week. BBC director general Mark Thompson says the arrival of the ”on-demand” iPlayer is as important as the first colour broadcasts in the 1960s.
Nine people were killed, including several civilians, in clashes between United States soldiers and militia fighters in Iraq’s holy Shi’ite city of Karbala on Friday. The clashes broke out at about dawn when US soldiers entered Kerbala, 110km south-west of Baghdad, and tried to arrest several militiamen from the Mehdi Army.
The European Union’s top antitrust regulator has charged that Intel tried to use its huge market share to push smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) out of the central processing unit business. The two companies make all the chips at the processing heart of the world’s personal computers and servers, but Intel has about 80% of the business.
Plans to incorporate municipalities’ metro police units into the South African Police Service (SAPS) could not have come at a worse time, Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille said on Friday. Zille, who is also mayor of Cape Town, said she was informed by ministerial letter on June 25 of the planned ”integration of municipality police into the SAPS”.