A revolutionary restructuring of football is being touted, which could see ”a government representative and a well-respected businessman” being appointed to a new body that would run the affairs of the country’s national teams, the head of the South African Football Association’s technical committee, Sturu Pasiya, told the Mail & Guardian this week.
With 2006 just a week old, we had seen the future and it looked horrible. Graeme Smith had finally completed his devolution from batsman to blabbermouth. Mickey Arthur seemed hell-bent on expressing himself through tactics he was gleaning from Biggles novels (”Drop that gun, Von Schtalhein! You know only one of us can bat at five to the over and walk out of this submarine pen alive and it isn’t you!”).
There was good news for rich people on Thursday, when an annual listing of the world’s billionaires showed there were more of them than ever. The 793 billionaires making the 2006 list published by Forbes magazine is an increase of 102 on last year. And the rich keep getting richer, with their total net worth up 18%.
Elections in Bolivia and Chile signal changes in Latin America: the emergence of women in prominent leadership positions and the leftward shift in political orientation. More significant than this realignment is the rise of women in a traditionally conservative and somewhat machismo political environment.
Prominent members of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) have been implicated in a R268-million fraud being investigated as part of a forensic audit on companies run by the late Brett Kebble. The youth league has been among the most consistent supporters of former deputy president Jacob Zuma and is likely to be hit hard by these claims against its most prominent business members.
<a href="http://www.mg.co.za/specialreport.aspx?area=zuma_report"><img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/243078/zuma.jpg" align=left border=0></a>Jacob Zuma’s lawyers spent much of Thursday trying to establish that Zuma’s accuser is a serial rape complainant who has levelled numerous groundless accusations against men in the past. And after four days of testimony, his lawyers told the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> they might be able to apply for the dismissal of the rape charge against Zuma as soon as his accuser has finished giving evidence.
In a poignant letter published recently in the Mail & Guardian, Hazel Makuzeni took the government to task over crime in Khayelitsha. Here she reflects on the divergent response of township residents to the African National Congress’s election setback in Cape Town.
A vitriolic attack on the Treatment Action Campaign as ”fronting for the pharmaceutical industry, drug-money laundering and pushing toxic drugs” still featured on the website of controversial vitamin peddler Matthias Rath — in violation of a recent court order forbidding him from further defaming the TAC.
Public Protector Lawrence Mushwana has denied that using the same lawyers as the African National Congress in litigation over Oilgate undermines his independence. ushwana, the ANC, Imvume Management and the Mail & Guardian have been locked in legal disputes over the M&G’s Oilgate exposés.
Abu Ghraib, the prison which will be forever linked with images of Iraqi detainees stripped naked and humiliated by their United States jailors, is to be closed. The sprawling, low-slung prison in the western suburbs of Baghdad, a torture chamber under Saddam Hussein that gained even more notoriety with the photographs of abuse committed by US troops, is likely to close within three months.