The Falcons recorded their first victory in the Currie Cup rugby competition when they beat the Griquas by 23-8 at the Bosman stadium on Saturday. The Falcons scored three tries to one and led by 6-5 at the break. The home side ground the visitors down in a hard fought contest for sixty minutes before taking control of the game in the last quarter.
For the past few months, I’ve been woken in the half-light just before dawn by the noise of crazed laughter coming from the park behind our house. To begin with, it was hard to be sure that it was human laughter and not just the cackle of wild dogs, but later I started seeing people walking home at about 6.30am, clapping their hands and laughing triumphantly to themselves.
A local journalist in the Democratic Republic of Congo was shot dead on Saturday at his home in Kinshasa, press rights group Journalists in Danger (JED) said, calling it an ”ignoble crime”. Bapuwa Mwamba (64) was killed by three armed men around midnight at his house in the Matete district where he lived with a nephew, JED said.
A Kenyan team on Saturday won the first street football world championship, beating South Africa 4-3 in a penalty shoot-out. Twenty-two teams of youngsters from poor backgrounds had taken part in the week-long tournament in Berlin, focusing attention on the game’s gritty origins and its power to fight social ills.
Visiting South African President Thabo Mbeki has been supportive of European Union plans to send up to 2Â 000 soldiers to the Democratic Republic of Congo before and after free elections, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday.
Fela Yunga, better known in his neighbourhood by his rap name XV Venom, will on Sunday sit down with his two brothers on the worn sofa in his parents’ council flat in Paris’s run-down 19th arrondissement. With a prison record, no real educational qualifications, an eye for girls and a thriving business selling T-shirts, Yunga, raised in France but born in the Democratic Republic of Congo 24 years ago, is hardly the model French citizen.
More than 150 people died, including all the crew, when a Russian Airbus A-310 with 200 people on board crashed early on Sunday while landing at Irkutsk airport in Siberia. The Airbus went off the runway while landing and hit a concrete wall before catching fire. The plane’s cabin was wrecked and the passengers had to be evacuated from the rear of the craft, rescuers said.
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Fireworks thundered and flashbulbs popped all around the darkened stadium, illuminating the German players’ brilliant white shirts and the thousands of flags that waved in their honour. Fans screamed and sang for an hour afterward, savouring the lingering moments as hosts of the World Cup. And that was after the consolation game.
The National Prosecuting Authority, also known as the Scorpions, says it has no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of South African President Thabo Mbeki in the arms deal. However, the investigative unit has information linking him to a French defence company implicated in irregularities related to the controversial deal. When Mbeki was deputy president in 1998, he allegedly met executives of Thomson-CSF in Paris.
We reached the mountain top in the Malutis as it began to snow. The icy wind bit into our cheeks. The weather was closing in fast.