Japanese driver Hiroshi Masuoka stretched his overall lead in the Dakar Rally after winning the seventh stage on Wednesday. Masuoka completed the marathon 701km stage between Tan-Tan in Morocco and Atar in Mauritania in a time of 5:58,35, more than five minutes ahead of French driver Stephane Peterhansel.
Tiger Woods is ready for a new year — only this time he has company. Brilliant sunshine along Maui’s rugged coastline only adds to the optimism at the Mercedes Championships, which kicks off the 2004 season on Thursday. ”Things have changed a little bit,” Ernie Els said. ”The ‘Tiger effect’ is not as strong as it used to be.”
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More than a third of Zimbabwe’s commercial banks are unable to honour all their customers’ cheques, threatening to cause gridlock in the Southern African nation’s already troubled financial sector, economists said on Wednesday. Six of the 16 institutions have been suspended from the daily clearing of interbank debt.
The United States-led coalition will release 100 people from Iraqi prisons on Thursday, with hundreds more to be freed in coming weeks, the top US official in Iraq, Paul Bremer, announced in a policy address on Wednesday. Bremer also unveiled a programme of rewards for the capture of more wanted individuals.
Three members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union involved in a national baggage handlers strike were arrested on Wednesday after they allegedly assaulted six non-striking workers of Equity Aviation Services on Monday. Earlier the African National Congress urged the two parties to return to the negotiating table.
The man at the centre of a Western Cape shark-baiting controversy on Wednesday explained his motives and actions in a letter to a local newspaper, saying they were misunderstood by the public. ”My motive and intention was to attract the large white shark out to the open sea away from the beach area,” he said.
Three major pan-African institutions will come into force in early 2004, the African Union announced on Tuesday. They include a much-heralded Peace and Security Council, modelled on the United Nations Security Council, as well as a pan-African Parliament and an African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
Initial data indicated that 36 fewer people died on South African roads last month than in December 2002, the transport department said on Wednesday. This represented a decrease of three percent, deputy director-general Sipho Khumalo told reporters in Pretoria.
The editor of the weekly newspaper Le Republicain, Mamane Abou, was freed from jail by Niger’s Court of Appeal on Tuesday, after serving two months of a six-month sentence for publishing sensitive government documents. Abou was jailed on 5 November for his alleged complicity in the theft of the documents.