The Australian government will hold talks with cricket authorities to cancel a Zimbabwe tour that could be seen as giving a ”blessing” to President Robert Mugabe, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Monday. ”I don’t want them to tour Zimbabwe. I think that is the wrong look,” Downer told journalists.
It’s lunchtime at Patel’s supermarket in Musina, South Africa, and a steady stream of Zimbabweans are stocking up on supplies for a country in crisis. One of the last shops before South Africa’s border with its northern neighbour, Patel’s once did a roaring trade selling everything from tomato sauce to pyjamas.
Real men don’t pose for the cover of a Harlequin romance. And that’s something the publisher wants to change. Representatives of Harlequin Enterprises, the biggest publisher of romance novels, inspected the assets of about 200 men who lined up at a casting house on Saturday to prove they could flutter readers’ hearts.
European leaders on Sunday celebrated the European Union’s 50th birthday, with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, telling the prime ministers or presidents of 27 countries that modern Europe was a dream come true. But the birthday summit was soured by Pope Benedict XVI, who declared that the continent could be heading for extinction.
The JSE was higher at midday on Monday on the back of cheerful sentiment on Asian markets in the absence of market-moving news on the local front. By 11.57am, the all-share index was up 0,37% at 27 013,630 thanks to a 0,86% rise in resources. The platinum-mining index was up 0,36%, while the gold-mining index was flat (-0,04%).
Drought has wiped out 95% of maize crops in a province of southern Zimbabwe, reports said on Monday. Matabeleland South is now expected to harvest just 5 580 tons of maize, out of the province’s required 115 565 tons, the official Herald newspaper said.
The prospect of a first-ever meeting between rival Northern Irish leaders on Monday raised hopes for a last-ditch power-sharing deal in the province, albeit delayed, hours before a crunch deadline. Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain admitted the midnight Monday deadline [local time] could slip by a few weeks.
Nigeria, Cameroon and Senegal all won African Cup of Nations qualifiers this weekend to stay at the top of their groups. Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Angola and Tunisia, four of the five teams that qualified for last year’s World Cup, also won. Ghana, the other World Cup participant, automatically qualifies for the 2008 tournament as host and faces Brazil on Tuesday.
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When Inzamam-ul-Haq bid a tearful farewell to international one-day cricket, the crowd rose to acclaim the great Pakistani. The problem was that there were so few people inside the 20Â 000-capacity Sabina Park in Kingston that Inzamam, had he so desired, could have personally shook the hands of all of them without delaying proceedings.
South African musician Yvonne Chaka Chaka, the ”Princess of Africa”, is an artist, a mother and a businesswoman.