Three-time champion Venus Williams came back from a break down in the last two sets to avoid a major first-round surprise on Tuesday against a Russian teenager playing her first match at Wimbledon. In men’s play, second-seeded Rafael Nadal and former champion Lleyton Hewitt were among the winners.
South Africa captain Jacques Kallis’s unbeaten 91 saw his side to a four-wicket win over India at Stormont in Belfast on Tuesday in the first of three one-day internationals. Kallis’s well-paced innings saw South Africa overhaul an India total of 242 for eight built around a third-wicket stand of 158 between Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid.
Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, where about 7 000 British troops are based, is on the verge of becoming the world’s biggest drugs supplier, cultivating more opium than entire countries such as Burma, Morocco or even Colombia, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.
The CIA conspired with a Chicago gangster described as ”the chieftain of the Cosa Nostra and the successor to Al Capone” in a bungled 1960 attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba’s communist revolution, according to classified documents published by the agency on Tuesday.
The corporate sector is the primary creator of jobs and work opportunities, said businessman Tokyo Sexwale in a speech released on Tuesday. ”The extent to which this sector is treated or maltreated, welcomed or unwelcomed, by far determines its continued appetite [for] and commitment to capital expansion and job creation,” he said.
North West province has set aside R14-million for laboratory tests to diagnose tuberculosis (TB) and get patients on treatment as soon as possible, the provincial health department said on Tuesday. A departmental spokesperson said every month at least 2Â 100 new TB patients start treatment in the province.
A 38-year-old man’s leg was amputated when he fell under a train at the Roodepoort railway station on Tuesday night, paramedics said. Netcare 911 spokesperson Mark Stokoe said the man was standing close to the doors of the train when it pulled into the station at 6.20pm, en route to Johannesburg.
Restive South African miners are likely to go on strike in coming months, but the relatively tight platinum market may have already priced in the effects of limited disruptions. Gold prices could see a brief psychological lift if miners walk off the job, but South Africa’s share of global output is waning and that market is less sensitive to supply issues.
As the wife of the United States president tours Africa, she will be shining a spotlight on malaria as well as Aids. While the former does not grab the same headlines, it far outstrips Aids as the continent’s biggest child killer, claiming one young life every 30 seconds.
President Thabo Mbeki is to deliver the opening address at the African National Congress’s policy conference in a bitterly cold Midrand, Gauteng, where delegates started arriving on Wednesday morning. The conference takes place against intense behind-the-scenes jockeying over the leadership of the party, and coincides with a bitter public-service strike.