Since his arrival at Tottenham Hotspur, Didier Zokora has often looked like a man who couldn’t pass a leg of lamb without feeling the urge to fling himself over it. Last Sunday at White Hart Lane he excelled himself, crumpling to the ground to earn a match-winning penalty under a tackle from Portsmouth’s Pedro Mendes that wasn’t so much a challenge as a diffident inquiry.
A stiff handshake as each tried to stare the other down and then, to the relief of chess fans, the familiar push of a pawn. Three hours later, an uneventful 31-move draw left Russia’s Vladimir Kramnik 3,5 to 2,5 ahead of Bulgaria’s Veselin Topalov with six games left in their -million world title unification match.
Over the past 10 years there have been times when it seemed the Currie Cup was about to die. No one cared about the oldest provincial rugby competition in the world because it was at the wrong end of the season and either through injury or exclusion clauses it tended not to feature the best players in the country.
Beach soccer spin doctors may credit former Manchester United striker Eric Cantona for helping spread the game around the globe, but the man doing that job in Durban last week during the African leg of the Fifa Beach Soccer World Cup qualifiers was, undoubtedly, Côte d’Ivoire’s Frederic Aka — without any pseudo-philosophical twaddle about seagulls, trawlers and sardines, thankfully.
"India is a roaring capitalist success story." So said a recent issue of Foreign Affairs; and earlier this year many business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth-richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor.
A 78-year-old woman managed to identify the men who raped her and then set fire to her body before she died, Eastern Cape police said on Thursday. The brutal rape and murder of the woman and her niece on Tuesday last week have left the Grahamstown community shocked and angry, according to police spokesperson Captain Mali Govender.
Shelter is precious in the refugee camps along the rocky road north of Muzaffarabad, the battered capital of Pakistani Kashmir. Hardly an inch is vacant as tents, rickety shelters and half-destroyed houses jostle for space along a narrow strip of land between the steep mountains and a rushing, slate-blue river.
South African Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel said on Thursday evening that the modern world offered many opportunities for public finance innovation and for new kinds of partnership with the private sector and across national boundaries, but that getting it right meant keeping it simple.
The construction of the controversial R5-billion De Hoop Dam in Mpumalanga will go ahead — but with restrictions. Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk approved the project last week, although he hinted that his final record of decision, to be released on October 13, would embody some conditions.
From gleaming shopping malls in downtown Nairobi to gold mines buried deep in the Congolese jungle, South Africa is flexing its corporate muscle on the world’s poorest continent. South African shopping chains Shoprite and Pick ‘n Pay bring choice and price stability to African market places, while millions have made their first phone call thanks to cellular operators MTN and Vodacom.