Changes to the mandate of the Donen Commission of Inquiry into possible illicit business deals between South African companies and individuals in former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s government were on hold for now, President Thabo Mbeki indicated in reply to a parliamentary question on Friday.
Jake White will tell you the best thing about the team he has picked for the first Test against Scotland this weekend is that they share 525 caps among them. Ad, while Os du Randt is back with John Smit to anchor the loosehead, the same confidence cannot be felt about Eddie Andrews on the tighthead.
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United States midfielder DaMarcus Beasley has heard the ugly words, vicious taunts screamed by fans in The Netherlands simply because he is black. Cameroon’s brilliant Samuel Eto’o was so sickened by insults hurled his way that he threatened to walk off the field.
The most remarkable thing about David Beckham is that he is not all that great a football player. He is good, sure. Some days he is excellent. But he is not great. What sets him apart, what makes him unique, is that never in sport has the gap been wider between a player’s talent and his fame.
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Playing in the stadium of his club side Marseille in 1998, South Africa’s lanky centre-half Pierre Issa put the ball in his own net twice against France and then muffed his team’s only clear-cut opening at the other end. World Cups have their zeros as well as heroes. Harry Pearson picks his XI to get nowhere.
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Should Germany be anything like as bad in this World Cup as they were in Euro 2004, fans who currently protest about his base in California will rant that Jürgen Klinsmann should never be allowed to leave it again. Though his citizenship is not yet being revoked, solidarity with him is tenuous.
Get used to it. It is early June and tennis is in thrall to Rafael ”Rafa” Nadal, the Majorcan who, once he steps on to a clay court, transmutes from softly smiling youngster to, in the estimation of one leading British coach, ”the toughest bastard the game has ever seen”.
The beleaguered N2 Gateway housing project in Cape Town has been dealt a further financial blow by the discovery that 705 units comprising the project’s first phase have been built on a 50-year flood plain. The city has had to fork out a further R10-million to build a culvert to divert possible flood waters.
Gwede Mantashe, the former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, is tipped to join the Development Bank of South Africa as the bank’s second-most senior executive. Union and government sources confirmed that Mantashe, who served as a unionist for more than 30 years was heading to the state-owned bank as executive manager for special projects.
Berlin has, after more than 60 years, reversed a policy of concealing the location of the bunker where Adolf Hitler shot himself in the final days of World War II. A large information panel was erected on Thursday near Wilhelmstrasse, above the underground labyrinth where Hitler married Eva Braun hours before committing suicide with her on April 30 1945.