The West Indies are hoping for a massive reversal of fortunes in the final Test against New Zealand in Napier on Saturday while the hosts are looking to pull off a clean sweep in preparation for their expected tough tour of South Africa. Despite their 10-wicket loss in the second Test in Wellington being the West Indies’ eighth successive defeat, coach Bennett King claimed his team’s spirits were still intact.
The private jet set has a new member. Baleka Mbete, the Speaker of Parliament, in January travelled to Monrovia in Liberia on a chartered flight with a price tag of R471 900. The trip, which was not publicly announced, took place amid a storm of controversy over Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s use of an airforce Falcon for a holiday in Dubai.
Transnet and four unions have embarked on a new collective approach to resolving the long-running dispute over plans to restructure the group into a focused and efficient state-owned freight transport company, a spokesperson for the transport parastatal said on Thursday evening.
The electronic game industry is dead, veteran computer software designers lamented in the heart of Silicon Valley on Thursday. Chris Crawford, whose experience creating electronic games dated back to when he went to work for Atari in 1979, sounded a death knell for the industry during a gripe session at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose.
Nearly 60% of "foreign-brand" liquor found in four major Chinese cities is fake, according to a random check carried out by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce. The administration inspected 40 bottles, mostly cognac and whisky, in 19 retail outlets and found 23 with Hennessy, Remy Martin, Martell and certain Scotch whisky labels were fake.
The 17-year-old who has applied for the post of Bafana Bafana boss is surely just mocking the South African Football Association (Safa), but his name appears alongside some big names in world football on Safa’s list of 43 formal applicants. Ruud Gullit, the former Dutch international who won the FA Cup with Chelsea in 1997, had informal talks with Safa a few years ago and has always shown interest in this highly desirable but controversial position.
The curtain rose in Toronto on Thursday night on an epic musical adaptation of The Lord of the Rings that has taken four years to produce, features 55 actors, 500 pieces of armour and 17 elevators, and cost about -million — making it almost certainly the most expensive stage production in history.
Ten trapped miners have been found alive 2km underground in a burning mine shaft at Buffelsfontein gold mine in Stilfontein, North West province. ”Yes, they have been found. All they said was that they were very hungry,” said Simmer and Jack mining company spokesperson Gail Strauss.
French President Jacques Chirac led a French walkout from the opening session of the European Union’s annual spring summit on Thursday night when a fellow Frenchman committed the grave offence of speaking English. Chirac picked up his papers and left, with Philippe Douste-Blazy, the Foreign Minister and Thierry Breton, the Finance Minister, in tow.
South Africa’s February 2005 producer price index (PPI) is expected to remain at January’s 5,5% year-on-year (y/y) increase. According to an I-Net Bridge survey of economists, the range is from 4,9% y/y to 5,9% y/y. The optimists expect the stronger rand to have kept factory gate prices subdued, while the pessimists believe rising oil and other commodity prices will lead to higher producer prices.