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At a rickety roadside café on the outskirts of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian football fans crowd a small TV screen watching the United States lose to the Czech Republic. When the screen goes fuzzy, the half dozen onlookers — stricken with World Cup fever — shout in protest.
With warm tropical waters, white beaches, bright shirts, snorkelling, cocktails and surfing, Hawaii seems to be the perfect escape from one of the hottest seats in South African business. It’s no wonder that Telkom CEO Papi Molotsane raves about the place. "It is relaxing and serene and the people are fantastic," says Molotsane.
"Yes, I get the ARVs, but I cannot afford to put a simple meal on the table," says Wa Kimani. "This is why I had to register at two treatment sites, so that I could get ARVs [anti-retroviral drugs] twice: utilise one set from one site, then sell the other batch from the second site, so that I can get something small to put in my stomach."
On May 15 this year, the United States announced its long-anticipated decision to restore full diplomatic relations with Libya. This decision will pave the way for Libya’s removal from the US list of states sponsoring terrorism and harbouring terrorists — and benefit US foreign policy in the Middle East in the short to medium term.
That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes only quickens their desire for reprisals. Ken Loach has been placed in preventive detention and is having his fingernails pulled out. In the London Times, critic Tim Luckhurst compares him — unfavourably — to Leni Riefenstahl.
It is to Alan Birchenall, a former Leicester City player, that we must turn for an incisive analysis of how the courtship rituals and mate selection of top-ranking football players conform to strictly Darwinian principles. ”You see lots of ugly footballers,” he said. ”But you never see any ugly footballers’ wives.”
For the past seven months the home affairs ministry has persistently misled the court and the country by maintaining that Khalid Mahmood Rashid was lawfully deported to Pakistan. In sworn affidavits to the court, the ministry stuck to this claim right up to the time that the South African Air Force spilled the beans, writes Zehir Omar.
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France and Switzerland opened their World Cup campaigns with a goalless draw high on endeavour but short on flair on Tuesday. France, the 1998 champions, were out to erase the nightmare they endured at the last World Cup when they never recovered from a first-match defeat to Senegal.
A high-ranking diplomat from South Africa’s High Commission in Zimbabwe was shot dead outside a house he had recently bought near Midrand, police said on Tuesday. North Rand police spokesperson Superintendent Eugene Opperman said Kingsley Sithole, a counsellor at the office in Harare, was attacked by unidentified people late on Monday night.