About 40 000 prostitutes will offer their services to football fans at the 2006 World Cup in Germany, according to experts. Cologne and Dortmund, two of the host cities for the World Cup, have even erected a number of wooden ”sex huts” for the football showpiece, with condoms and showers at hand.
The City of Johannesburg does not have a billing crisis, but a service crisis, its finance department said on Thursday. ”It is not really accurate to say we have a billing crisis, but rather to say we have a customer-service crisis,” said Roland Hunter, acting head of the city’s revenue shared services centre.
The prime interest rate is to remain unchanged at 10,5% after the South African Reserve Bank opted on Thursday to keep the repo rate, at which it lends money to commercial banks, at 7%. This was announced by Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni on Thursday after the bank’s monetary policy committee meeting.
Russian police who smelled something amiss when the owners of a Moscow apartment failed to pay their bills found four mummified corpses and a fridge full of out-of-date food. Investigators established that the bodies were those of four family members, who died at intervals over a five-year period.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe opened a session of Parliament on Thursday with a speech defending an unpopular police crackdown on street traders and shack dwellers.He said the clean-up campaign is necessary to ”restore sanity and order” to urban areas.
When the Springboks take to the field at Absa Stadium in East London on Saturday, there will be far more than just a convincing Test win over the underdog Uruguayans at stake. South Africa are guaranteed to rout a team 11 places below them on the International Rugby Board world rankings.
At least 30 people have died since interclan fighting broke out on Monday in the town of Beletweyne, south-central Somalia. More than 70 people have been wounded and hundreds more displaced in the violence, now in its fourth day, local sources said on Thursday.
The government has denied asking the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) to investigate whether any organised force was behind recent service delivery protests. It said in a statement on Thursday this was confirmed at the Cabinet’s fortnightly meeting in Cape Town on Wednesday.
South African Airways said it is still mystified by the identity and origins of a mutilated body found in the wheel-well of one of its aircraft that flew to New York. It has been reported that parts of the body fell out of the aircraft as the pilot lowered the aircraft’s wheels to land at New York’s John F Kennedy airport on Tuesday.
Nato defence ministers were finalising plans on Thursday for the alliance’s first mission in Africa — helping to fly an extra 5 000 African peacekeepers to the troubled Darfur region of Sudan. They also considered boosting the alliance’s presence in Afghanistan ahead of September parliamentary elections there.