Troops loyal to South African presidential hopeful Jacob Zuma have arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo in preparation for a coup against the incumbent President, Joseph Kabila. The African National Congress Youth League is keen to find new sources of income with which to foot the bill for its "babe magnet" BMWs.
"Soccer runs in our family’s veins," says proud dad Ozzie Liebestein. And sometimes outside his family’s veins, too, by the looks of things: five minutes into the interview the nasty gash to his forehead is still oozing. Most fathers might have had a few sharp words to say to their sons had they too been felled by a roundhouse kick to the mandible, but Ozzie will hear none of it.
South African football bosses have unanimously committed themselves to keeping unwelcome attitudes and influences out of the local game. "Victrocentrism" — the disturbing desire to win matches — has been identified as a major threat to local football.
The International Space Station (ISS) is missing and nobody is terribly sure where it has gone. In an extraordinary press conference at Cape Canaveral this week, Nasa admitted that the last communication from the two astronauts on board was more than 48 hours ago and was said to be: “Hey, what’s going on? You guys didn’t say you were sending a shuttle.”
The Department of Education has announced that the next and necessary phase of its futuristic policy will be introduced on a trial basis during the second half of this year. The new phase is called Incomes-Based Education and will be exactly what it sounds like. The more the learner pays, the more the learner gets taught.
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/ 23 December 2005
At some point in the past 10 years or so — opinions differ as to exactly when it was — people working in the toy industry began to notice something troubling. Toy marketers, perhaps to counterbalance the idea that they spend their days playing, pride themselves on their keen business sense.
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/ 21 September 2005
Being friends with George makes certain demands upon one’s patience. Most of the time, in one-to-one conversation, he’s chatty enough, and sometimes even witty. He’s prone to sudden outbursts of hostility, and to interrupting serious conversations about politics or morality to yell incomprehensibly about Joan Crawford or The Da Vinci Code.
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/ 7 September 2005
Nobody, give or take the occasional blues musician, likes to admit to being lonely. People who study loneliness, like Harvard University psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds, typically have to rely on anonymous surveys to gauge the size of the problem. On the Internet, though, anonymity is the default position, which explains the extra-ordinary story of what happened on the website Moviecodec.com.
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/ 5 November 2004
The defeat of John Kerry could bring a silver lining for one Democratic presidential hopeful: Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose chances of reoccupying the White House as chief executive looked better this week than ever before. Had Kerry won, he would almost certainly have run again in 2008. By the time Clinton’s next chance came around, in 2012, she would have been 65, and probably perceived as too old.
One man ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month — and the results were far from pretty. Oliver Burkeman meets cult movie-maker Morgan Spurlock.