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The latest chapter in South Africa’s sorry Cricket World Cup history was put down to a case of stage fright by former stars on Wednesday as the Proteas once again suffered semifinal heartache at the hands of Australia. However, the team defended their aggressive batting tactics and denied they had panicked.
The ashes of Star Trek star James Doohan will be blasted into space on Saturday when a rocket carrying a symbolic portion of the late actor’s cremated remains is launched in New Mexico. Doohan, beloved for his role as the USS Enterprise‘s chief engineer Montgomery ”Scotty” Scott, died aged 85 in 2005.
China Eastern Airlines will begin flying the first-ever direct service between mainland China and South Africa with the launch of a Shanghai and Johannesburg service on April 27. Meanwhile, South African low-cost airline Mango is to introduce additional daily flights between Johannesburg and Cape Town on week days.
The <i>Mail & Guardian</i>’s investigative team of Sam Sole, Nic Dawes, Zukile Majova and Stefaans Brümmer were jointly awarded the Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Award for South African story of the year on Wednesday for their story "The Kebble-Selebi link". The quartet also won the award for best investigative journalism.
The prospect of peace in Somalia, after 16 years of violence and bloodletting, receded further this month, even as President Abdullahi Yusuf’s transitional federal government prepared to hold talks with adversaries to draw a road map to a comprehensive peace settlement. Nairobi-based international humanitarian organisations estimate that more than 2 000 people, mainly civilians, have died in the latest flare-up.
Apple Macs may be the hippest looking computers on the market, but they are the least environmentally friendly, according to Greenpeace. The organisation’s guide to greener electronics was released this month and places Apple at the bottom of the pile with a score of 2,7 out of 10. According to the report, Apple scores poorly against almost all the criteria, with very little progress.
A start-up telecommunications company has the country’s biggest guns in its sights as it slashes the costs of phone calls by offering a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service. Cape Town-based Yeigo is one of the first companies worldwide to offer VoIP for cellphones.
The introduction of an online verification process by Visa and Mastercard could set the stage for a new boom in online shopping in South Africa. Using Verified by Visa, which is widely used in Europe and America, provides protection for customers and merchants transacting online by ensuring that the person making the purchase is the owner of the card. Mastercard’s Securecode offers similar protection.
A proposal to give American shareholders a vote on executive pay was overwhelmingly approved by the lower house of Congress last week as DemoÂcrats fought to tackle increasingly lavish multimillion-dollar boardroom handouts. American unions, politicians and institutional investors are angry about telephone number-sized sums.
Up to 400 000 people may have fled fighting in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, the United Nations’s humanitarian chief said on Thursday, warning that aid had reached less than a fifth of the refugees. The UN refugee agency said last Friday that an estimated 321 000 Somalis had fled Mogadishu since the beginning of February.