Winning the French Open for the fourth time meant more to Justine Henin than simply lifting the Suzanne Lenglen trophy again — it proved to her that she could go it alone. The Belgian had won her previous five grand slam titles while married to Pierre-Yves Hardenne.
France coach Bernard Laporte said his battered young team had learnt a painful but valuable lesson about the reality of international rugby following their record 61-10 loss to New Zealand. Laporte selected an inexperienced squad for the two-match tour because it clashed with the French club championship and the result was a massacre.
A hostage drama ended in central Cape Town on Saturday night when police stormed the Nyoni’s Kraal restaurant, shooting dead the hostage taker and releasing the hostages. Inspector Bernadine Steyn said a specialised police team set off a stun grenade and several shots were fired when they entered the restaurant shortly after 6.30pm.
Threats to dismiss striking health workers could only provoke workers’ anger and undermine current ”sensitive” negotiations, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) said. ”Dismissing workers would not work towards addressing the current public-service crisis. [The] root-cause of which is total disregard of workers demands by government,” the union said in a statement.
Eyeing his cellphone with a mixture of suspicion and amazement, Paul Kangethe reads and rereads the SMS he has just received. ”I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Kangethe says of the alert that instructs him to report to the nearest cellphone shop to retrieve money his brother-in-law sent him just moments ago. Kangethe is one of more than 65 000 registered users of M-Pesa, a mobile money-transfer system.
Five Lebanese soldiers were killed on Saturday in the latest bout of heavy fighting against al-Qaeda-inspired militants entrenched in a Palestinian refugee camp, a military source said. At least 125 people, including 53 soldiers and 42 militants, have been killed since the fighting began on May 20, making it Lebanon’s worst internal violence since the 1975/1990 civil war.
Marc Baron was putting a brave face on his future employment prospects last week. Baron is the lead guide for one of New York’s most successful tourist enterprises — The Sopranos Tour — in which visitors are taken round 45 locations used in filming the TV series The Sopranos
Senior sources in Sierra Leone believe Britain is about to freeze a £15-million payment to the West African nation amid evidence of endemic corruption that has seen millions of pounds in aid line the pockets of dishonest officials while ordinary people struggle in conditions of catastrophic poverty .
The space shuttle Atlantis winged toward a rendezvous with the International Space Station on Sunday, lugging a heavy payload for the orbital outpost and troubled only by a small tear in a heat-protecting thermal blanket. Nasa plans to fly 12 more missions to complete the station.
When it comes to snooping in cyberspace, internet giant Google is the online world’s biggest brother, according to a new report. The California-based company, famed for its enlightened style of management, is painted in a less flattering light in the first attempt to rank internet companies on their respect for users’ privacy.