South Africa and Guatemala played to a 1-1 tie in one of the final first-round games of Gold Cup play at Reliant Stadium on Wednesday night. Mexico played Jamaica in the late match. South Africa, playing its second straight tie after a 3-3 stalemate against Jamaica on Sunday, finished first-round play with a 1-0-2 record. Guatemala ended the first round with an 0-2-1 record.
Bernard Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, was sentenced on Wednesday to 25 years in prison for his role in the -billion fraud that drove the once high-flying American company into the largest bankruptcy in corporate history.
Like millions of Harry Potter fans, Katherine Moss can’t wait to get her fingers on a copy of the sixth entry in JK Rowling’s best-selling series. And for once, the 16-year-old blind student won’t have to wait weeks longer than her sighted friends to dive into Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
United States workers are goofing off for two hours a day, trawling the internet or jawing with co-workers, costing their employers -billion a year, according to a new survey. Other ways of frittering away time included making personal phone calls, running errands and an activity described as ”spacing out”.
Former United States president Bill Clinton will embark on a week-long, six-nation African tour this weekend aimed at boosting the work of his foundation in combatting the scourge of HIV/Aids in the continent. Clinton will seek to ”reinvigorate political will” for scaling up HIV/Aids treatment programmes.
Abnormally warm weather off the Pacific coasts of Alaska and Canada has decimated the plankton population off shore from Northern California, Oregon and Washington state, causing widespread seabird mortality and potentially devastating the marine food chain, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
Nasa’s long-awaited return to manned spaceflight looked in jeopardy on Tuesday night after technicians accidentally chipped part of the space shuttle Discovery less than 24 hours before Wednesday’s scheduled lift off. The space agency worked frantically overnight to assess the damage.
Dazzlingly white, perfectly aligned … and now with a touch of glamour: New York cosmetic dentists are offering smiles fit for a movie star. Recently, a semi-permanent prothesis — known as ”snap-in veneers” — has become available. Made of resin, the veneers are placed over patients’ teeth, allowing them to flash teeth like those of their favourite actor or actress.
Jamaica and South Africa drew 3-3 on Sunday, joining the United States and Costa Rica in the quarterfinals of the Concacaf Gold Cup while Mexico beat Guatemala 4-0 to recover from its upset loss to the Bafana Bafana two days earlier. Honduras also clinched a quarterfinal berth, beating Colombia 2-1 in Miami to hand the South Americans their second loss.
Hurricane Dennis sent Gulf coast residents fleeing on Sunday, but spared the region the worst of the predicted devastation after it weakened shortly before landfall. The hurricane, which left 32 people in Haiti and Cuba dead, arrived in Alabama and northwestern Florida packing 192kph winds, pounding the beachfronts in an area that was hit by Hurricane Ivan just 10 months ago.
A new push is being made to deliver television over an internet platform, with the potential to transform the medium into a new technology that offers more competition and programme choices. The ”convergence” of television and the internet is being pushed, interestingly, by major regional United States phone companies.
A woman who threatened to kill Catherine Zeta-Jones, cut her up and then feed her to dogs was jailed for three years on Friday after the Oscar-winning actress branded her as ”simply evil”. Dawnette Knight (35) was put behind bars after an angry and withering statement from Zeta-Jones was read to the court.
An Ohio man with the breasts of a woman has been charged with indecent exposure after he was spotted shirtless. "He’s a guy. He’s real tall, and he’s got a full set of breasts," assistant Cincinnati solicitor Kevin Donovan told the <i>Cincinnati Post</i>.
A Maine man arrested when police showed up to break up a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house has filed a lawsuit, arguing he has a constitutional right to get drunk on private property as long as he doesn’t cause a public disturbance. Eric Laverriere was locked in a cell for nine hours until the effects of the alcohol wore off.
Women who plan to testify against actor and comedian Bill Cosby in another woman’s sex assault lawsuit will not have their identities shielded by the court, a judge ruled. A former Temple University employee is alleging that Cosby drugged and then fondled her. The other women make similar allegations.
A pioneer of handheld computing who claims that Microsoft pressured companies to boycott his new invention has sued the software giant for antitrust violations between 1987 and 1994, the San Jose Mercury News reported on Wednesday.
During her first five years in the navy, Jen Kopfstein avoided conversations about her personal life, taking the military’s ”don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays seriously. ”I felt like I was being forced to lie and having to be dishonest,” Kopfstein said. ”I could never share anything about my family or my home life or even say what I did on the weekend. It is hurtful to do that.”
A New York Times journalist was jailed for up to four months for contempt on Wednesday after she refused to reveal the source in an investigation into the leak of an undercover CIA officer’s name. Judith Miller was sent to a Washington DC jail for a term that will last until October, unless she relents and reveals her source.
Tropical Storm Cindy began moving ashore on Wednesday, pelting the Louisiana coast with rain and intermittent squalls. Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Dennis is brewing in the Caribbean but will likely arrive in the Gulf of Mexico by the weekend.
July 5 is the earliest date on record for four named storms.
The Bush administration has decided to retain control over the principal computers which control internet traffic in a move likely to prompt global opposition, it was claimed on Friday. The United States had pledged to turn control of the 13 computers known as root servers — which inform web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct internet traffic — over to a private, international body.
Microsoft on Friday agreed to pay IBM -million to settle a long-running dispute arising from a government antitrust case. The companies said the payment settled claims arising from the federal government’s landmark antitrust case against Microsoft in the mid-1990s, in which IBM was identified as having been affected by certain Microsoft practices.
When it comes to churning out hits, most musicians stick to the same recipe that gave them sweet success the first time around. If a rapper’s shoot-em-up tales sold eight million albums, there’ll be more on the follow-up. If a starlet’s skimpy outfits and booty-shaking lured fans to the record stores five million times, count on similar apparel and moves the next time.
Anyone who searches regularly for articles and documents on subscription websites knows the problem: you can only search them one at a time because their content does not appear in normal web searches. Yahoo thinks it has the solution in what it calls its Search Subscriptions service.
American high-speed cable networks are not required to provide access to rival internet service companies, the US Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a case watched for implications on competition for internet access. The ruling paves the way for the federal regulators to ease open-access obligations on big phone carriers.
Some of the world’s most inventive scientists were on Monday awarded grants totalling -million to turn their outside-the-box ideas into practical solutions to the 14 greatest problems besetting human health today. Among the 43 projects to receive funding are several aiming to produce vaccines that do not require refrigeration.
Family advocacy groups lauded Yahoo for closing its chat rooms to clean up areas that allegedly were used to prey on children. Over the past month, pressure has been building on Yahoo to crack down on chat rooms that promoted sex with minors.
Drugs alone will not help Africa beat HIV/Aids, one of the scientists who discovered the virus that causes the disease said on Thursday at an African business summit. Robert Gallo said merely providing drugs to countries battling HIV/Aids ”is not scientifically sound” and that it will give rise to multi-drug resistant strains.
United States feminist Gloria Steinem was among a small group of protestors on Wednesday who sought to take the sparkle out of the gala opening in New York of South African diamond giant De Beers’ first US showroom. The protest, organised by the lobby group Survival International, picketed celebrities like Hollywood starlet Lindsay Lohan as they arrived at the event.
The United States and Mozambique inked a trade and investment framework agreement on Tuesday in Washington with the goal of increasing economic ties. United States Trade Representative Rob Portman and Mozambican Minister of Industry and Commerce Antonio Fernando signed the deal.
Plans by De Beers to expand its diamond retail empire with the opening of a new shop on Wednesday on Fifth Avenue in New York will be dogged by controversy after a human rights group called for a boycott. Survival International said it had enlisted the American feminist Gloria Steinem to join a picket line urging people not to enter the shop.
Hoping to build upon the power of its internet leading search engine, Google is believed to be developing an online payment system that that would pose a stiff challenge to online auctioneer eBay’s industry-dominating PayPal service. Google declined to comment, but the company’s silence didn’t muffle the buzz about a service that would set up a showdown between two internet powerhouses.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s controversial eviction of illegal dwellers will be studied by a United Nations envoy to see whether it has had a humanitarian impact on those affected by the measure, a UN spokesperson said on Monday.