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Long before the first football was kicked at the World Cup earlier this month in Germany, hard-line Islamists were busily denouncing the massive competition as a corrupt show of Western influence. But as the daily matches have gone on, Islamists using the internet have shown they are not immune to World Cup fever.
Wing Wylie Human got a hat-trick of tries for the Lions but his side ended up with a single bonus-point reward for their efforts in their opening Absa Currie Cup rugby match in Durban on Friday night as the Natal Sharks claimed the spoils for a 33-22 victory and a bonus point for four tries.
The Blue Bulls were lucky to scrape home 18-16 against a motivated Falcons side in a game on a cold and bitter evening at Loftus Versfeld on Friday night. The Bulls struggled in a second-half performance that must go down as one of the worst in years as the Falcons stormed back in the game.
Another Ali is going to fight in Africa. Nearly 32 years after Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the ”Rumble in the Jungle”, his daughter, Laila, plans to fight this summer in Cape Town, South Africa. ”There’s a lot of love for Ali in South Africa,” she said on Friday. ”I’m following in my dad’s footsteps.”
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Switzerland and France rounded off the last 16 in the World Cup finals in Germany on Friday as they recorded 2-0 victories over South Korea and Togo respectively. The Swiss will play Ukraine, while the French face a tough battle with in-form Spain for a place in the last eight.
A Brazilian court on Friday cancelled the sale of bankrupt airline Varig to an employees group after it failed to make a deposit on time, and delayed a decision on the carrier’s fate until next week. Like the two previous days, about two-thirds of Varig’s flights were cancelled on Friday.
The Eastern Cape province has defended a planned visit to Germany by its premier and senior officials in what has been dubbed a ”Soccer World Cup junket” by a watchdog body. The Public Service Accountability Monitor said the ”junket” should be declared fruitless and wasteful expenditure by the auditor general.
”We are here in Africa. We live in the mainstream, we pay taxes like everybody else in the mainstream, we relate with people in the mainstream. We are a naturally occurring phenomenon in the universe,” said activist Donna Smith of gay people in Africa, at the second Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights this week in Nairobi.
The Siamese twin girls born in the Arwyp hospital in Kempton Park on Wednesday night are doing well, the hospital said on Friday night. Hospital superintendent Wiam Stander said the babies will ideally stay in the hospital for the next four to six months while scans and tests are done to facilitate their separation.
A construction worker trapped when a wet concrete slab collapsed was found dead at midnight on Friday after hours of searching. ”Just after midnight we found the body,” Johannesburg emergency services spokesperson Malcolm Midgley said on Saturday. ”He was in several metres of concrete that were starting to set.”