If there’s a five-letter expletive in Cape Town these days, it’s Eskom. With just one exception, Eskom’s executive directors, who earned R73-million last year, are the highest paid in the country. The city has racked up losses of hundreds of millions of rands in power cuts and load shedding and faces a bleak winter as the country runs out of electricity capacity.
Last week Oom Krisjan had a good laugh at the expense of the South African and German navies as they defended an apparently waterlogged Berlin from attack. But this week Johanna Mars from Saldanha e-mailed the oom to let him know that the joke was on him. It seems the war games were focused on defending the Berlin, a high-tech German ship and not in fact a grimy German city.
Two Indian weightlifters have tested positive for banned substances at the Commonwealth Games and have been ordered to leave the athletes village, Indian team sources said Thursday.
World junior champion Louis van Zyl led home a South African one-two in the men’s 400m hurdles final at the Commonwealth Games on Thursday. The 20-year-old broke the Games record with a time of 48,06 seconds to edge out compatriot Alwyn Myburgh, while Kemel Thompson of Jamaica took the bronze.
From a small hill in southern Israel, about an hour and a half south of Tel Aviv on the edge of the Negev desert, the political geography of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is apparent in one sweeping vista. Immediately ahead is the Mediterranean Sea, sometimes described as ”Israel’s only good border”.
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Hamas leaders on Wednesday said they hope to open a dialogue with the European Union, aiming to prevent the bloc from cutting off hundreds of millions of dollars in vital aid. The EU has threatened to scale back aid to the Palestinians once Hamas, which won the Palestinian legislative elections in January, officially takes office.
President Thabo Mbeki has terminated the services of suspended National Intelligence Agency (NIA) head Billy Masetlha with immediate effect. Briefing the media at Parliament, government communications chief Joel Netshitenzhe said this followed Mbeki’s determination that the relationship of trust between himself and Masetlha had irreparably broken down.
Mohamed Sissoko has completed one of the most remarkable comebacks in football after helping Liverpool into the last four of the FA Cup only a month after being temporarily blinded in his right eye. Sissoko played the full 90 minutes of Liverpool’s 7-0 thrashing of Birmingham on Tuesday evening.
A British terrorist cell with alleged links to al-Qaeda discussed killing and maiming revellers at a large central London nightclub, as well as targeting power facilities, a court was told on Wednesday. One of the seven men also discussed trying to buy a radio-isotope or so-called ”dirty bomb” from the Russian mafia, but nothing appeared to have come from his enquiries.