Downloads at Apple’s iTunes Music Store have reached a million tunes in Japan in just four days, the company said on Monday. Apple Computer, which has scored a hit in Japan with its iPod portable music player, started its music download service in Japan last Thursday with one million songs.
The landing of the beleaguered Discovery space shuttle has been delayed due to low clouds over Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, Nasa announced this morning. The seven astronauts were originally preparing to land on Monday morning, but the bad weather put the landing back to later in the day.
United States generals hope to withdraw up to 30 000 troops from Iraq by next spring, signalling increasingly firm plans for a phased US pull-out. In a classified briefing to senior Pentagon officials last month General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, reportedly said the equivalent of more than 20 brigades would leave if conditions were right.
Doctors fear that the identity of a mysterious mute pianist found wandering on an English beach in April might never be known, a British newspaper reported on Monday. ”We have discounted a lot of the names and continue to look at those which remain. But there is no obvious lead,” said an official at the Little Brook Hospital in Dartford, Kent.
Scores of the United States’s richest people have pledged -million or more towards a new attempt to reinvigorate the American left and counter the powerful Republican political machine. The money will be funnelled through an organisation called the Democracy Alliance which will help fund a network of thinktanks and advocacy groups
A planned civil-society coalition — likened to the United Democratic Front (UDF) of the 1980s — will not become a political party to challenge the African National Congress, organisers said on Sunday. ”Cosatu [the Congress of South African Trade Unions] is not creating an organisation called the United Democratic Front,” a Cosatu spokesperson said.
Three trucks filled with food and blankets for Zimbabweans are still in Johannesburg waiting for clearance from Harare, the South African Council of Churches said on Monday. The trucks were due to leave last week but have been stuck in Johannesburg while paperwork is sorted out.
Braziers used for heating are being blamed for the deaths of three people burnt to death and another two suffocated in shacks in Ivory Park, on the North Rand, this weekend. A woman and her two sons burnt to death when their shack caught fire on Saturday night.
Municipal workers’ unions and the South African Local Government Association (Salga) met on Monday in another attempt to resolve a wage dispute that has seen a countrywide resumption of a pay strike. The meeting was taking place even though Salga had already imposed a 6% wage increase against the unions’ demands.
Ajax Cape Town gained a valuable point in their CAF Champions League game against the number-one team in Africa, Egypt’s Al Ahly, when they held them to a goalless draw at the Athlone Stadium on Sunday. The experience of the visitors showed, but the home side kept their heads.