Vijay Singh, the defending champion at the Deutsche Bank Championship, pulled out of the ,5-million PGA event on Tuesday. ”I have always defended a title on the PGA Tour and I am greatly disappointed I won’t be able to do so in Boston,” Singh said. ”I hope to return to Boston in 2006.”
Powerful winds and torrential rains brought by Typhoon Talim pounded eastern Taiwan on Wednesday as the central weather bureau warned residents across the island against floods. With a radius of 250km, the typhoon was moving west-northwest at a speed of 21kph, packing winds at its centre of up to 184kph.
Australian rugby captain George Gregan will equal England prop Jason Leonard’s record of 114 Test caps and team with Mat Rogers at flyhalf when the Wallabies play New Zealand at Eden Park on Saturday in the final Tri-Nations match. Gregan will lead a side with five personnel changes.
A six percent economic growth rate is not a pipe dream and could be achieved by early in the next decade, an Absa economist said on Wednesday. John Loos said some economists may be underforecasting and that the six percent ”was a real possibility”.
Oil prices rose on Wednesday, with New York’s main crude contract above on concerns that refineries may be unable to produce sufficient fuel after being battered by Hurricane Katrina, analysts said. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in October, rose 67 cents to ,48 per barrel in electronic trading.
About 30 ANC councillors stormed out of a Buffalo City council meeting on Tuesday in a rumpus over the mayor’s official house, East London’s Daily Dispatch reported. It said on Wednesday the walk-out reduced the council meeting to chaos and it had to be abandoned.
The former Western Cape leader of the Independent Democrats, Lennit Max, won a high court order on Wednesday preventing the party from filling his seat in the provincial legislature. Judge Dennis Davis also declared that Max’s expulsion from the party, ordered after an internal disciplinary hearing, be suspended until his appeal is finalised.
At least 647 people were killed and 301 injured on Wednesday in a stampede in Baghdad on a bridge near a Shi’ite shrine where tens of thousands of the faithful were gathered, a security official said. Many of the dead drowned after falling off the bridge in a surge of panic triggered by rumours there were suicide bombers in the crowd.
A senior United Nations official has accused President George W Bush of “doing damage to Africa” by cutting funding for condoms.
The role of South Africa as a mediator in the lead-up to the planned October 30 elections in the Côte d’Ivoire has been successful so far, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad said on Tuesday. Pahad said Defence Minister Mosioua Lekota would report to the United Nations on Wednesday on the current state of mediation.