The Wellington Hurricanes have sounded the battle cry ”Get McCaw” as they set their plan to target the All Blacks captain in the Super 14 rugby final against the Canterbury Crusaders at Jade Stadium in Christchurch on Saturday. The Crusaders have played in seven of the past eight finals, and won five of them.
Afghan troops, backed by coalition planes and artillery, battled a strong force of Taliban insurgents overnight and early on Thursday in southern Afghanistan, already reeling from some of the heaviest fighting in years. New fighting erupted late on Wednesday in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province, a coalition spokesperson said.
Police increased security at Istanbul’s Atatürk International airport on Thursday as authorities and companies began to assess the huge damages caused by a raging fire and tried to determine what caused it. A hard-line Kurdish militant group has claimed responsibility in an e-mail to a pro-Kurdish news agency.
A small earthquake caused panic in Stockholm on Wednesday night when inhabitants mistook a loud bang for an explosion, police said. Hundreds of Stockholm residents alerted police and abandoned their homes when they heard the noise, fearing a bomb had gone off.
Zimbabwe has poured cold water on the idea of the United Nations helping to solve its economic and political problems, Harare’s Herald newspaper reported on Thursday. ”I am unaware of any UN intervention on Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is not a UN issue,” Secretary for Information and Publicity George Charamba told the paper.
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David Beckham is no longer England’s main man. The 31-year-old midfielder — known as much for his glamorous lifestyle, fashion sense and tattoos as for his bending free kicks — has been eclipsed as England’s key player. Wayne Rooney, still recovering from a broken foot, is the player England’s opponents fear most.
A report this week that South African Football Association (Safa) technical committee chairperson Sturu Pasiya held face-to-face talks with Portugal and former Brazil coach Luiz Felipe Scolari on the issue of Bafana Bafana coach for the 2010 World Cup was on Wednesday described as a ”pie in the sky”.
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If the soccer gets boring at the World Cup, watch out for the secret signals between the match officials running the game. Over the years referees have developed discreet ways of passing or receiving messages, often involving the assistants helping out the man in the middle when he or she may not have seen an incident.
Anug Shah is a happy man. He makes bed nets at his factory in Tanzania and business is booming. Production at the A to Z Textiles plant has increased tenfold in the past 18 months and a new factory is needed for a further trebling of output by the end of the year. The workforce of 3 200 — 90% of them women — will double.
The town of Black Jack, Missouri, got its name from the variety of oak tree that once grew nearby. It is the kind of place where family is valued — just as long as the family in question meets certain criteria. Olivia Shelltrack and Fondray Loving’s family, it seems, do not.