Ernie Els is hoping it will be 13th time lucky when he tees off in The Masters in Augusta on Thursday. The big South African has carved out an impressive record at Augusta since his first appearance in 1994 with six top 10 finishes, including runner-up slots in 2000 and 2004.
Tiger Brands and Nestle announced on Wednesday that an agreement in principle has been reached for the acquisition by Tiger Brands of the sugar confectionery portfolio of Nestle in South Africa. The sugar confectionery portfolio of Nestle includes such well-known brands as "Jelly Tots" and "Wilson’s".
The World Short-Course Swimming Championships suffered the loss of yet another top athlete as Australia and the United States dominated the opening heats on Wednesday. Double world champion Roland Schoeman, the top draw here in the absence of swimming greats Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett, was a late withdrawal citing a lack of fitness, organisers said.
Police fought running battles with rioters in central Paris on Tuesday night as youths attacked officers with bottles and concrete at the end of a mass demonstration against a youth employment law that has caused a political crisis for President Jacques Chirac’s ruling party.
The international community is determined to move former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s war crimes trial to The Netherlands, and will even ensure that his defence witnesses will be able to appear there, a United Nations official said. At his first court appearance on Monday before the UN-backed war crimes court, Taylor had asked through his lawyer that his case remain in Sierra Leone.
In the skies above Gaza, an Israeli drone circles slowly overhead before its distant buzz is drowned out by the whistling of a missile. "You see, this is what our life has become," says Abdallah as he watches the missile explode nearby in a massive cloud of dust.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was accused on Tuesday of dragging his country’s already raucous general election campaign into the gutter when he declared that those who voted against him would be ”dickheads”. Speaking to journalists about the expected outcome of the election, Berlusconi said: ”I have too much respect for the Italians to think there are that many dickheads around who’d vote against their own interests.”
Iraq’s embattled prime minister has defiantly refused to give up his claim to head the country’s next government in spite of strong American and British pleas for an end to a deadlock which has paralysed the country for almost four months.
"This is war too," murmurs an ex-child soldier in southern Sudan, stone-faced and staring blankly at a placard reading: "Let all children go to school … Leave no child behind." A year after the end of two decades of fighting with regimes in Khartoum in a conflict that claimed 1,5-million lives and displaced four million people, south Sudan has declared war on illiteracy.
The child squirms drowsily as it struggles to roll over on the bunk bed, eventually succumbing to sleep. The skin on its face is too taught. Wisps of hair look as if they could fall out at any minute. "He is just from his daily ARVs [anti-retroviral drugs]," says the woman who takes care of him at an orphanage in the eastern Zimbabwean city of Mutare.