The Wellington Hurricanes return from overseas to confront a South African opponent on home turf on Friday at the start of the seventh round of rugby union’s Super 14. In the absence of the competition leaders, the Canterbury Crusaders — who have a bye — the Hurricanes have the chance to move into first place if they can dispatch the Sharks.
For the first time in at least 40 years, supplies of Coca-Cola dried up Wednesday in yet another sign of the crippling economic crisis in Zimbabwe, where people suffer acute bread shortages and farmers warn that worse is yet to come. Harare agents for the United States Coca-Cola company said local production of the drink stopped earlier this month, but refused to give official reasons.
A family who disappeared while on holiday in a remote mountain area were safely back at home on Wednesday after spending nearly three weeks marooned in their snow-bound motor home at an altitude of 1 158m. They survived by rationing dried food, bought in anticipation of a millennium bug meltdown in 2000, and drinking snow.
A Spanish hospital ship and patrol boats trawled international waters off Mauritania on Wednesday looking for would-be immigrants on a new and dangerous sea route from Africa to Europe that has already claimed more than 1 000 lives. Police picked up 122 immigrants from the beaches of the holiday island of Tenerife on Tuesday.
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.
Our watchdogs are waking up — the guardians of the public good across the private and public spheres are baring their teeth in favour of the citizen and the consumer. It has come not a moment too soon, as these offices are vital to ensuring transparency in public process and private transaction.
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”.