Brett Lee and Glenn McGrath gave Australia a strong start in the third Test after making in-roads into the South African batting on the rain-delayed opening day at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Monday. The match began after lunch as the entire morning session succumbed to rain and skipper Graeme Smith won the toss and batted on a greenish pitch under cloudy skies.
The New Zealand cricket team returns to its happy hunting ground at Jade Stadium confident of wrapping up their one-day international series against Sri Lanka on Tuesday. A win would put New Zealand firmly into fourth place in world rankings while Sri Lanka would drop out of the top six teams guaranteed direct entry into the Champions Trophy tournament later in the year.
A 47-year-old handyman is expected to appear in the Knysna Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday following the murder of a six-year-old Johannesburg boy in Plettenberg Bay. Theuns Christian Olivier was remanded by the Plettenberg Bay Magistrate’s Court on December 27 after Steven Siebert was found murdered on December 24.
A battle for what is being called ”the high moral wave” was on Sunday night being fought off the wild coast of Antarctica as the world’s two leading international marine protection groups fought each other over which would stop the Japanese whaling fleet.
A South African woman was kidnapped and raped several times during the course of a day after her drink was apparently spiked at a nightclub in Mumbai, media reports said on Monday. The woman apparently ordered a drink and asked the barman to keep an eye on it while she went to the toilet.
A dozen men and women crowd the entrance to an unmarked upstairs clinic in one of Lagos’s main hospitals while others sit patiently outside a special pharmacy. A sign nearby directs patients in the opposite direction, to the ”fee-paying government hospital pharmacy” — but this discreet dispensary, run by Médecins Sans Frontières, is free.
With a population of just 70, the Karoo village of Nieu Bethesda seemed to embody the imagination and creativity of a South Africa reborn after apartheid. But now another South Africa, one of poverty and inequality, has crashed into it, exposing segregation, racial tension and government neglect.
For four years, they survived some of the harshest conditions of World War II to get crucial supplies through to their besieged Russian allies, facing ceaseless bombardment, repeated U-boat attacks and some of the bitterest temperatures on Earth.
South Africa, an economic and political leader in Africa, is also the continent’s number one jailer. If prisons are a reflection of society, what conclusions are to be drawn from this reality, particularly in a nation rightfully proud of its nascent democracy? In global terms, South Africa is not alone in registering a sharp increase in its prison population.
Two plane crashes which killed more than 200 people, including schoolchildren, and a clampdown on opposition figures were the striking events that blighted Nigeria’s social and political landscape in 2005. ”2005 is a year that is ending on a catastrophic note and I do not expect any radical change from our leaders in 2006 because they are bereft of good leadership,” said reverend Gabriel Osu, spokesperson for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Lagos.