Queensland captain Nathan Sharpe will be forced to keep his emotions in check during Friday night’s clash against the Highlanders after the Reds launched a desperate campaign to retain the Wallabies enforcer. Sharpe, off-contract at the end of the season, is one of several high-profile Queensland players being head-hunted.
The South African Towing and Recovery Association (Satra) will no longer pay spotting fees to people at traffic lights for accident tip-offs, its chairperson announced on Wednesday. A Roodepoort man was caught allegedly tampering with robots at a busy intersection, trying to cause accidents to increase his tip-off fees.
About 100 000 mineworkers are to strike at Harmony and Gold Fields gold mines, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) said on Wednesday. ”Gold Fields workers will this evening [Wednesday] begin with strike action following their dispute with the company on the matter of the living out allowance,” an NUM spokesperson said.
Research will be done into the demand for Afrikaans as a medium of school instruction, Minister of Education Naledi Pandor said after talks on Wednesday with a group of Afrikaner representatives. The meeting, in Pretoria, was arranged at the request of the FW de Klerk Foundation, and facilitated by the former president.
A string of cellphone messages on a purported hijacking this week turned out to be smokescreen for partying with prostitutes, News24 reported on Thursday. It said a KwaZulu-Natal technician had police on a national alert after unleashing a series of SMSes on Tuesday, saying he had been hijacked.
<img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/199502/Zim_icon.GIF" align=left>The South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) expressed alarm on the eve of parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe that the country’s government "has failed to lift all restrictions on journalists and media, especially foreign media", adding that "these actions do not bode well for free and fair parliamentary elections".
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Zimbabweans waited in long lines on Thursday to cast ballots in parliamentary elections that President Robert Mugabe hopes will prove the legitimacy of a regime critics say is increasingly isolated and repressive. Despite a light rain, residents in Harare started gathering at the polls up to three hours before they opened.
It put a man on the moon and gave the world the non-stick saucepan, but faced with an impending budget crisis, Nasa has been forced to cancel a more down-to-earth project: gardening. Staff at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama have been warned that no new flowers will be planted until further notice, to save money.
The Vatican indicated for the first time on Wednesday that Pope John Paul II is no longer actively running the Catholic Church. In a statement announcing that the ailing pontiff is now being fed through a tube in his nose, his spokesperson said merely that the pontiff is ”following” the church’s activities.
Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq war, on Wednesday wooed and won over sceptical and hostile European ministers with a pledge to fight global poverty, ensuring his selection on Thursday as the next World Bank president. Charities and aid organisations accused European leaders of rolling over under Wolfowitz’s charm offensive.