Wits University, again, proved to be Orlando Pirates’ hoodoo team when they knocked the Buccaneers out of the lucrative Supa 8 Cup, winning a tense quarterfinal clash 2-1 at the Oppenheimer Stadium in Klerksdorp on Sunday. The teams produced a fast-paced and evenly fought first half.
Any remote chance of earning some sort of medal in Athens effectively went out the door for the South African men’s hockey team when they lost to 11th-ranked New Zealand 4-1 at the Elliniko Olympic Hockey Centre on Monday. The South Africans played well below par and got their lone goal from Emile Smith.
Special Report: Olympics 2004
A controversial new device that allows drinkers to inhale alcohol without the effects of drunkenness or hangovers has been introduced in the United States, media reports said on Sunday. The Alcohol Without Liquid vapouriser, or AWoL, allows drinkers to inhale alcohol fumes combined with pressurised oxygen, leaving them euphoric, but not drunk.
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Edvard Munch’s famous paintings The Scream and Madonna were stolen from an art museum on Sunday while stunned museum-goers watched armed men threatening the staff at gunpoint as they took the art works to a waiting car, police said. Museum visitors panicked and thought they were being attacked by terrorists.
The Sudanese government has signed an agreement with the United Nations’s migration agency ensuring that more than one million people displaced by the 18-month Darfur conflict will have the right to return home voluntarily, but only once they feel the situation is secure enough to do so.
A Malaysian woman is trying to beat a world record set by another woman in neighbouring Thailand for the longest stay in a room full of scorpions, news reports said on Sunday. Nur Malena Hassan (27) on Saturday entered a glass box with 6 000 scorpions at a shopping arcade.
Soldiers and armed police patrolled the Bangladeshi capital on Sunday, a day after more than a dozen bombs were thrown at an opposition rally, killing at least 18 people and wounding more than 300, including senior opposition members. The main opposition leader, Sheikh Hasina, escaped injury when the bombs exploded.
A car bomb exploded north of the Iraqi capital on Sunday, killing two people and injuring four others, including a deputy provincial governor, police said. Bassam al-Khadran, one of several deputy governors working in the province, was injured in the blast. Both fatalities and the three other injured were al-Khadran’s bodyguards.
Kenya is to write off about six billion shillings (about R481-million) owed by coffee farmers, whose sector has suffered as a result of the depressed world coffee market, the president’s office said on Sunday. Coffee production has steadily slumped from about 127 000 tons in the mid-1980s to about 49 000 tons last year.