Pakistan’s cricket chief said on Wednesday it was time for the national team to move on after Jamaican police revealed that coach Bob Woolmer was not murdered after all, and died of natural causes. Nasim Ashraf, chairperson of the Pakistan Cricket Board, said he was glad to see the end of a ”traumatic” three months.
The Wall Street Journal, whose parent Dow Jones is the target of a -billion takeover offer by News Corporaiton, is set to shake up its newsroom by reassigning and replacing several top editors, the New York Times reported on its website.
Bickering African countries threw an international trade conference into deadlock over whether to ease an 18-year ban on ivory sales, with opponents warning it will increase the poaching threat in countries where elephants have almost disappeared.
South Africa’s Telkom, Africa’s biggest telecoms company, posted a 1% decline in annual headline earnings per share on Wednesday, as operating expenses jumped. South Africa’s fixed-line operator said headline EPS fell to 1 710,7 cents in the year to end March, below analysts’ expectations.
The case of former spy boss Billy Masetlha was rolled over to Thursday because some of the assessors in the case could not make it to court. Chief state prosecutor Matric Luphondo said the disruption of public transport due to the public-service strike meant that some of the assessors could not reach work.
The highest ranking United Nations official in Israel has warned that American pressure has ”pummelled into submission” the United Nations’s role as an impartial Middle East negotiator in a confidential report. The 53-page End of Mission Report by Alvaro de Soto presents a devastating account of failed diplomacy.
As the country braces itself for a mass public-sector protest action on Wednesday, government and union negotiators moved closer to clinching a deal in the wage talks. Talks between the two parties at the Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council in Centurion continued well into the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Countries that take the lead in directing domestic efforts against HIV and Aids seem to have the greatest success. ”We get the best results in countries where the host government assumes the leadership for the response,” said Dr Tom Kenyon, chief deputy coordinator of the United States President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief.
”Criminals do not deliberately target US citizens or other foreigners, but seek targets of opportunity and select those who appear to have anything of value. Pickpocketing is widespread.” The United States state department’s advice for travellers to Albania is presumably not intended for the leader of the free world being escorted by a phalanx of bodyguards.
South Africa’s civil-service strike broadened on Wednesday as other union workers walked out, piling more pressure on the government in a dispute stoking political tensions in Africa’s largest economy. Union leaders have vowed to shut the country down in sympathy with civil servants, whose two-week-old strike has already caused chaos in hospitals, schools and public offices.