New Zealand is aiming to wrap up their one day cricket series 5-0 against the West Indies here on Saturday but already has one eye on the Test series starting next week. Spinner Daniel Vettori, sure to be a crucial member of the Test attack, is being rested for the final one dayer, although team management said there was no injury problem for the left-armer.
Twelve years after rebels butchered thousands in tiny Kpolopkpalah in central Liberia, Martha Yarkpawolo spends her days sitting on the rock where so many were slain, singing sorrowfully. The trauma is still fresh for survivors of one of Liberia’s worst wartime massacres.
He may not seem particularly frivolous nowadays, but as a teenager Vladimir Putin stole his first kiss during a New Year’s Eve game of spin the bottle, the blushing recipient revealed on Thursday. Vera Brileva, now a married pensioner, said she dated the future Kremlin chief when he was 16.
A fourth person was due to appear in court on Friday, charged in connection with the British record £53,1-million robbery, as three others remain in custody. Jetmir Bucpapa (24) is accused of conspiracy to commit robbery at a Securitas cash depot in the town of Tonbridge, in Kent, southeast England, last Wednesday.
South African Football Association president Molefi Oliphant is facing the sternest test to his leadership yet. A group of national executive committee (NEC) members that ascended into the soccer body’s hierarchy in October last year openly challenged national office appointments and decision-making processes this week.
After action, the old cigarette ad suggested, came satisfaction. South African sport usually takes this one step further: after satisfaction, crucifixion. The afterglow of temporary success has barely winked out when we invariably start apportioning blame for past losses.
Somalia could become the next ”war on terror” battleground as the United States zeroes in on al-Qaeda and Islamist groups reportedly trying to exploit a power vacuum in the world’s most anarchic state. Looking on helplessly are two million Somalis facing drought and famine, and aid agencies hampered by warlords, kidnappings and piracy.
Recently, elderly Katrina Mtsweni, of Delmas’s Botleng township, received a surprise visit from President Thabo Mbeki. Mtsweni, who lives in a dilapidated shack in the Mandela B section waited for a lull in Mbeki’s sweet talk before asking him to help repair her leaking, collapsing shack. The very next day, brand-new corrugated iron sheets arrived at her door.
The Democratic Alliance failed to regain most of the hinterland municipalities in the Western Cape it lost to the African National Congress through floor-crossing, despite its aggressive ”Take back your city” campaign. Instead, Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats emerged as potential queenmakers in several finely balanced rural municipalities.
Security at Cape Town’s Koeberg nuclear power station is in need of a complete rethink, critics have argued following the government’s announcement that one of the nuclear facility’s generators had been sabotaged. ”Three years ago Greenpeace managed to get people into Koeberg undetected,” Institute of Security Studies military analyst Henry Boshoff said.