<a href="http://www.mg.co.za/specialreport.aspx?area=rugbyworldcup07_home"><img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/317644/icon_rwc_03.gif" align=left border=0></a>The All Blacks pleaded with New Zealanders to "keep the faith" at an emotional farewell on Wednesday as they left for France, intent on snapping a 20-year Rugby World Cup drought. To the strains of a stirring haka, the World Cup favourites made clear their determination to erase the chokers’ tag that has dogged them ever since they won the inaugural cup in 1987.
A group Johannesburg metro police and South African Police Service officers were receiving specialised training from the United States’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Johannesburg on Wednesday. The course on detecting and preventing money laundering forms part of a continuing skills transfer from the US law enforcement authorities.
Zimbabwe’s state media on Wednesday called on the government to sever ties with Australia, accusing Prime Minister John Howard’s government of seeking to topple veteran President Robert Mugabe. ”There is no need to continue keeping up appearances when diplomatic ties between the two countries have irrevocably broken down,” the state-run Herald said.
United States Republican Senator Larry Craig on Tuesday vehemently denied he was gay, despite pleading guilty after being arrested by police probing lewd incidents in an airport bathroom. Craig (62) was arrested in the Midwestern city of Minneapolis-St Paul in June by a plainclothes police officer.
A new email urging recipients to watch a video of themselves on YouTube actually directs them to a fake site that infects their computers and turns them into spam machines, security experts have warned. A hacker group known as ”Storm Botnet” began dispersing the emails over the weekend.
Chipmaker Intel unveiled its new high-performance central processing unit at the recent Leipzig Games Convention in Germany. The Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 was shown to members of the press and industry ahead of the official opening of Europe’s biggest show for interactive entertainment.
Sony says it will start selling a combined television tuner and personal video recorder that lets users of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console capture live television that can be stored or transferred to the PlayStation Portable (PSP) for later viewing. Sony announced the new product at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany.
Yahoo! has introduced new features for its popular web-based email program, including software that allows computer users to type text messages on a keyboard and send them directly to someone’s cellphone. The enhancements make it easier to send email, instant messages or SMSs from a single website.
The King of New Orleans, Fats Domino, is one of the few optimistic people in the still devastated city. ”Everybody is doing the best they can. I think New Orleans will recover,” he says on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. That is not a view shared by many of the city’s 250 000-plus residents still waiting to return to their homes.
Former South African World Cup-winning flyhalf Joel Stransky is backing the three southern-hemisphere powers as well as hosts France to have the biggest impact at this year’s Rugby World Cup, which kicks off on September 7. ”If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on South Africa,” he said.