The Blue Bulls scored six tries to the Falcons’s three as the home side won their first Absa Currie Cup game of the seaon at Loftus Versfeld on Friday night by 43 points to 26. The bonus-point win for the home side didn’t produce anything for the courageous visitors who stood tall against a team that included nine players from Super 14 final.
Veteran United States actor Morgan Freeman is to play former South African president Nelson Mandela in a drama based around the leader’s appearance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, it was reported on Friday. Freeman said he was honoured to be given the opportunity of playing Mandela, Daily Variety reported.
United States space shuttle Atlantis landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Friday after a fiery descent through the Earth’s atmosphere that capped a two-week mission to the International Space Station. The shuttle touched down at Edwards at 19.49pm GMT, shimmering in the heat and sending up a plume of brownish-gray dust.
Champion amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius can compete against the world’s best able-bodied athletes while researchers try to determine whether his prosthetics give him an unfair advantage, a spokesperson for the international track authority said.
Four people died and 41 others were seriously injured when two trucks and a bakkie collided in Blinkpan outside Witbank, Mpumalanga police said on Saturday. Spokesperson Captain Leonard Hlathi said three of the people died on impact, while a fourth died on arrival at the Cosmos Hospital in Witbank on Friday morning.
Rebels attacked an army base in Niger, killing 13 soldiers and taking at least 47 prisoners on Friday, the government said. An ethnic Tuareg group claimed responsibility, just days after it said it was behind an assault on a local airport. In addition to the 13 soldiers killed, 30 others were wounded at the base, about 2 000km north-east of the capital.
The CIA is to declassify records detailing operations including illegal domestic surveillance, assassination plots and kidnapping, undertaken from the 1950s to the early 1970s. The records were compiled in 1973 at the behest of the then CIA director, James Schlesinger, and collected in a dossier known as the ”family jewels”.
European Union leaders clinched agreement on Saturday on a mandate to overhaul the 27-nation bloc after persuading Poland to end a stand-off that nearly torpedoed a marathon summit. The leaders agreed to negotiate a reform treaty by the end of this year, to be ratified by mid-2009.
Prime Minister Tony Blair ended his swansong appearance on the international stage on a high note on Saturday, helping clinch a deal for a new European Union treaty and trumpeting that Europe was turning Britain’s way. And tributes flowed from his fellow EU leaders after a marathon summit in Brussels, which he said allowed the reforming bloc to ”move on” after two years of institutional inertia.
The hostage taker at a hair salon in Vanderbijlpark was shot dead by police early on Saturday morning. A single shot was fired, bringing to an end an eight-hour hostage drama around 2.10am. ”It’s over, he is no longer,” said police spokesperson Captain William Mcera. Both hostages were safe, he said.