This was the race Michael Schumacher was supposed to close the gap on Fernando Alonso in the chase for the Formula One championship. After all, Schumacher had won the Canadian Grand Prix seven times. Alonso never had anything but trouble at the Circuit Gilles Villeneueve.
East Timor’s Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri, widely blamed for triggering last month’s bloody unrest, resigned on Monday in a move expected to ease tensions in the impoverished nation. The announcement sparked jubilation on the streets of the violence-hit capital Dili, where truckloads of protestors cruised the streets waving red, yellow and black East Timorese flags with horns blaring.
<a href="http://www.mg.co.za/specialreport.aspx?area=soccer_world_cup_2006"><img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/272488/icon_focuson_wc3.gif" align=left border=0></a>The official opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) says it is to submit questions to all national departments of government in South Africa about which politicians and officials have gone to Germany during the World Cup at taxpayers’ expense. This follows a report that the KwaZulu-Natal transport department was sending a delegation to look at the German transport system.
The New Zealand doctor who turned his surgery into a brothel has had so little business he may have to go back to treating patients himself, a newspaper reported on Monday. The girls at Whalers — the only brothel in New Zealand’s Far North — have not exactly been flat out since Dr Neil Benson opened the doors last month.
Bearing a message from the Russian who invented the world’s most common assault rifle, activists will press governments at a United Nations conference on small arms to ensure such weapons are not used to trample human rights. The groups and some officials at the conference advocate a fundamentally new approach for trade in the light arms that are said to kill 1 000 people a day.
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British and German police were aided by heavy rain that had most fans running for cover after a weekend that saw hundreds of arrests. Fears that the fan violence that gripped Stuttgart on Saturday would be repeated on Sunday were erased by England’s 1-0 win against Ecuador and the driving rain.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was heckled on Monday after being named the most influential Australian of all time by a weekly current affairs magazine. The 75-year-old chairperson and chief executive of News Corporation — one of the world’s biggest media conglomerates — topped a list of 100 notable Australians released by The Bulletin magazine on Monday.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Sunday urged churches to help state efforts to revive the country’s ruined economy but warned that priests who dabbled in politics could face a ”vicious” backlash. ”We cannot do without each other as the church and the state,” Mugabe told thousands who gathered at a stadium outside the capital Harare to pray for an end to Zimbabwe’s deepening economic and political crises.
Activists familiar with street protests outside the venues of annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are in for a different treat at this year’s gathering. Singapore, the host country of the mid-September event, is sparing little to ensure that its penchant for thought control will be evident.
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African rivals have shown their support for Ghana’s World Cup squad, with visits from star players and letters of support encouraging the Black Stars ahead of a second-round match with mighty Brazil. ”The other African teams were eliminated. Now we represent Ghana and Africa,” said captain Stephen Appiah.