Departing Auckland Blues coach David Nucifora will take up the position of the Australian rugby Union’s (ARU) high performance manager in June, ARU chief executive John O’Neill told reporters in Sydney on Wednesday. The former Wallabies hooker will replace Pat Howard, who returned to Australia last year after a successful stint with English club side Leicester Tigers.
A Japanese centre which says it has trained a dog to sniff out human cancer cells is cloning the animal in South Korea, a Seoul bio-technology company and the dog’s owner said on Wednesday. Cloned foetuses from the black labrador retriever named Marine were last month implanted into a surrogate mother dog.
Learning Latin, attending Catechism and hurrying along draughty corridors to prayer, two dozen boys are experiencing old-fashioned British boarding school life — deep in the French countryside. Boxing, folk-dancing and Gregorian chant also figure on the curriculum at Chavagnes International College, a traditional Catholic English boys’ boarding school on France’s Atlantic coast.
Despite a number of ongoing risks and structural imbalances in South Africa, the rand has a very good chance of strengthening impressively for the rest of this year and into 2009, say market analysts ETM. They say, however, that levels approaching 6,50 to the dollar — should they be reached — would probably be difficult to sustain.
South Africa’s ”awesome foursome” are making waves less than three months before the Olympic Games in Beijing — despite revelations that the support for the South African Olympic swimmers from Swimming South Africa could come to a halt, according to the Sunday newspaper Sondag.
Opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai will not return to Zimbabwe on Saturday, fearing an assassination attempt, an MDC spokesperson said. Tsvangirai had been expected to return home on Saturday ahead of a run-off election scheduled for June 27.
The African National Congress and its labour allies called on Friday for electricity prices to rise only gradually, rejecting the state power firm’s appeal for a sharp hike to solve a dire power crisis. ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said it would be wrong for Eskom to use price rises to recover from past losses.
South Africa’s economy cannot afford a sharp electricity price increase, a leader of the African National Congress (ANC) said on Friday, adding that Eskom should not be allowed to use pricing to make up past losses. As part of efforts to tackle power shortages and fund infrastructure expansion, Eskom has requested a 53% increase in electricity tariffs.
A further -billion of debt relief for the world’s poorest countries is needed despite a decade of progress, the Jubilee Debt Campaign warns on Friday. The group’s latest report calls on the G8, World Bank and International Monetary Fund to cancel -billionn of debt, which it says is ”unpayable” and an obstacle to the battle against global poverty.
President Thabo Mbeki has scoffed at his detractors on the left of the tripartite alliance, with an official close to him saying he considers the demands of the alliance summit mere ”noise”. ”These people need lessons on how government is run. You can’t ignore the ANC and government processes and try to hold people ransom with new demands.”