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.
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.
The European special envoy for Kosovo has dismissed suggestions that the European Union favours partitioning the province between its ethnic Albanian majority and a northern Serb enclave, saying the idea had not been discussed and was not a realistic option.
A leading member of Germany’s Jewish community has accused the government of failing to control right-wing extremism following an attack on a group of Indian men in an eastern town. His remarks followed a brutal attack on eight Indians in the town of Mügeln, near Leipzig, at the weekend.