The people of Perth are debating whether they can live with the idea of supporting a team by the name of the Western Force, while the management team, headed by former All Black coach John Mitchell, are securing the signatures of a host of top players. Meanwhile, in South Africa the bickering over the fifth Super 14 franchise has only just begun.
The African National Congress’s Western Cape conference has been postponed for the fifth time, amid continuing organisational disarray that has fuelled backroom manoeuvring for leadership positions. Current provincial ANC leader Ebrahim Rasool will stand for a third term at the June conference, but a challenge is looming from the ”Africanist camp”.
Last week the West Bromwich Albion striker Kevin Campbell spoke of his hope that the Baggies would soon ”shake off the yo-yo club tag”. Wise words indeed, but then the big centre-forward has been around long enough to know that in football if you don’t shake off a tag, it can quickly become a millstone round your neck.
Back in August, when AK Graz rudely took the lead at Anfield, Liverpool’s Champions League adventure was at risk of stalling before it took off. What, you wonder, was whirring through the mind of Rafael BenÃtez? New to the place, he knew that failure to hurdle a summer Champions League qualifier against Austrian opposition would test the Kop’s goodwill.
<b>AUTHOR’S NOTES:</b> Written over a period of five years,<i>The Dream in the Next Body</i> earned feminist scholar Gabeba Baderoon the Daimler Chrysler Award for South African Poetry. Baderoon talks to us about the book.
The turnaround at Transnet — close to insolvency last year — has been so rapid that it can finance a R40,8-billion infrastructure investment programme entirely off its own balance sheet, says Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin. Erwin told Parliament last Friday that a government-coordinated financing strategy for parastatals is no longer needed.
Glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula are shrinking rapidly as a result of climate change, scientists have found. In the most comprehensive study of its kind, researchers measured 244 glaciers on the peninsula, each typically stretching tens of kilometres from the Antarctic mountains to the surrounding seas.
South Africa’s High Commissioner to Uganda, Bavumile Vilakazi, died of a heart attack in Kampala on Thursday, Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said. The heart attack occured just after Vilakazi had picked up Deputy President Jacob Zuma from the Kampala airport.
Spain has become the third country in Europe to legalise gay marriage, with Parliament also giving same-sex couples the right to adopt children. The move by the Socialist government of this traditionally Roman Catholic country provoked the ire of the church, which has found itself increasingly at odds with the Prime Minister, José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero.
United States President George Bush on Thursday weighed in publicly for the first time to try to swing Republicans behind his controversial choice of US ambassador to the United Nations. In a week of unusual division among Republicans, Bush’s efforts appeared aimed as much at his own party as at Democratic senators, who have fought strenuously to try to derail the candidacy of hardliner John Bolton.