Goalkeeper Paul Robinson’s place in the England squad was being questioned by the British press on Thursday after he gifted Germany an equaliser in a friendly at Wembley, which the visitors won 2-1. Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard put England ahead in the ninth minute but a bad mistake by Robinson gifted Schalke striker Kevin Kuranyi an equaliser in the 26th minute.
Springbok wing Akona Ndungane has been sent home from his team’s short tour of Ireland and Scotland for medical treatment, the South African Rugby Union announced on Thursday. Ndungane was injured in his team’s 18-3 victory over Connacht in Galway, Ireland, in a World Cup warm-up match on Tuesday.
Fernando Alonso is refreshed and ready to step up his championship challenge as Formula One heads to Turkey this weekend. The 26-year-old Spaniard has been relaxing on holiday since the pit-lane controversy in Hungary three weeks ago and he is in optimistic mood going into his 100th grand prix.
There will be no Munchkins skipping among the daisies, and the Yellow Brick Road will be updated with the latest computer technology in the Warner Brothers remake of one of the most popular films of all time. To the inevitable horror of the movie’s thousands of ardent fans, the producers have vowed to inject the story with a ”2007 wow factor”.
Eve Ensler has just returned from hell. That is how the author of The Vagina Monologues describes her trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where tens of thousands of women have been sexually attacked and mutilated in the African nation’s civil war.
Senegal’s movie business, home of some of the continent’s first black filmmakers, is in the throes of crisis with cinema theatres downing shutters as cheap and mostly pirated DVDs flood the markets. Many cinema halls have been turned into warehouses for anything from spare car parts to cheap Chinese trinkets hawked on the streets.
A Johannesburg man rescued his daughter from the jaws of a hyena after it attacked the girl in Botswana, Beeld reported on Thursday. The animal grabbed eight-year-old Christin Chalwin-Milton on the left side of the head while she was asleep in a chair next to a campfire in the Okavango Delta.
Shimon Peres, Israel’s President, said on Wednesday in an interview at his Jerusalem office he sees a ”real opportunity” to make peace with the Palestinians and highlighted progress on both political and economic agreements ahead of further talks to be held in the United States this autumn.
More than two million tickets have been sold for the Rugby World Cup, which kicks off on September 7, the organising committee of rugby’s showpiece four-yearly event said on Wednesday. "We have sold 2,05-million tickets and it’s not finished since we’re still shifting about 1Â 500 a day," said committee head Bernard Lapasset.
United States President George Bush sought to buy more time for his Iraq ”surge” strategy on Wednesday by making a risky comparison for the first time with the bloodshed and chaos that followed the US pull-out from Vietnam. He made it clear he will resist congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal.