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New Zealand’s Stephen Fleming announced his resignation as captain of his country’s one-day team after the 81-run defeat by Sri Lanka in the World Cup semifinals on Tuesday. But Fleming said he wants to continue playing in the side and stay in charge of the Test team.
A trio of banks led by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has proposed a €72-billion (-billion) bid for ABN Amro, threatening to thwart an agreed takeover of the Dutch bank by Britain’s Barclays. The RBS group, which also includes Spain’s Santander and Dutch-Belgian bank Fortis, said on Wednesday it planned to offer €39 a share for ABN Amro.
Tamil Tiger rebels and Sri Lankan soldiers held a truce as their national side marched to the cricket World Cup final, but sentries were forced to miss the match to keep a keen lookout, officials said. ”There were specific instructions to maintain a high alert and ensure that men who were on duty remained in their posts and did not scoot off to watch the match,” a military source said.
Wayne Rooney brilliantly trumped AC Milan’s Brazilian star Kaka to fire Manchester United to an exhilarating 3-2 victory in the first leg of their Champions League semifinal on Tuesday. Just as it seemed that Kaka’s first-half double would be enough to earn Milan a draw, Rooney raced on to a through ball from Ryan Giggs and hammered a low drive into the net.
Ethiopia on Wednesday accused arch-foe Eritrea of supporting the rebels behind an attack on a remote Chinese-run oil field that killed 74 people, including nine Chinese workers. Eritrea immediately denied the claim — the latest in a string of accusations and counter-accusations between the rival neighbours.
World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz is uncloaking new measures at the institution apparently designed to appease his critics and regain the initiative after weeks of fast retreat in the face of accusations of nepotism and an international downpour of criticism for his management style.
The murder of a Mount Frere teacher in front of her grade two pupils raised the issue of security at schools, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said on Wednesday. ”It is intolerable that teachers and learners should face such horrific incidents when they are in school,” spokesperson Patrick Craven said in a statement.
Somalia’s government is holding up vital aid to tens of thousands of people as car bombs and street fighting brought the death toll to nearly 1Â 500 in less than a month, sending the country lurching toward catastrophe, diplomats and witnesses warned.
Russia prepared to bury former president Boris Yeltsin on Wednesday, mourning the man who dismantled the Soviet Union and piloted the country in its first chaotic years of independence. In a break with the past, he was to be buried not alongside previous Kremlin leaders, but at the capital’s Novodevichye cemetery alongside actors, writers and performers.
At least 70Â 000 South Africans are sufficiently frustrated with their arch-nemeses on the road — taxi drivers — to rush to pummel them in cyberspace. This is according to iLogic, the creators of online game Taxi Wars, who claim to have tapped into the ”vein of public frustration”. According to iLogic, their website has received a whopping 70 000 visitors in the 24 hours since the site had first appeared in the media.