As a football columnist, you are expected most weeks to be a newspaper’s guardian voice, its moral conscience on matters of significance for the game. When you see Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer at each other’s throats, you should be outraged at a scene that tells of a decline in the game’s standards of behaviour and the shocking example it sets to youngsters.
For once none of the FA Cup semifinalists, queuing up somewhere down the westbound M4 to Cardiff as I write, is on for a double. Ever since Chelsea fell to Newcastle on the night the great Jose Mourinho lost count of his substitutes, the Premiership leaders have been out of this particular race.
James Vaughan may have been heralded as the new Wayne Rooney after becoming the Premiership’s youngest ever goalscorer on Sunday but he will have to wait a while before sending his girlfriend on shopping trips to Milan. The 16-year-old has been handed a whopping £10-a-week pay rise but will have to wait until June before that finally kicks in.
People jumped from windows or screamed for rescue from flames as a pre-dawn fire on Friday roared through a Paris hotel used by local government to house needy African families, killing at least 20 people, half of them children. More than 50 people were injured, 11 seriously, in the blaze that was thought to have started in a first-floor breakfast room of the one-star Paris Opera hotel.
A British grandmother scared a burglar away by hurling a garden gnome at the intruder who was consequently arrested by police, reports said on Friday. Sixty-nine-year-old Jean Collop was woken early on Tuesday morning by the sound of an intruder on the roof of her home in Wadebridge, Cornwall.
All Blacks halfback Byron Kelleher scored two tries as the Waikato Chiefs overran South Africa’s Cats 45-14 in a Super 12 rugby match at the Waikato Stadium on Friday. The Chiefs’ loose forwards and outside backs stood out as they posted their second straight four-try victory over a South African opponent to bounce off the bottom of the table.
Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika says he refuses to forgive two journalists who wrote that he was afraid of ghosts and that they will have to defend themselves in court, state television reported on Friday. ”It was a total lie designed to destroy my character … that’s why I will not forgive them,” Mutharika told a rally in Lilongwe on Thursday.
A number of teachers from government-run schools in the Philippines are being given crash courses ahead of the new school year because they lack proper training in certain subjects they teach. The remedial classes are being given for those who have to teach science, mathematics, chemistry, biology, as well as in English.
A week after the Mail & Guardian reported the four-year mystery of a nuclear worker’s death, his family received a surprise R6 000 cheque from the Department of Labour. The covering letter stipulated that the money was for burial expenses –although Victor Motha was buried four years ago and his family has received a departmental refund for funeral costs
Eastern Cape Premier Nosimo Balindlela has appointed a commission of inquiry into the province’s financial affairs, including maladministration, fraud and corruption in all state departments and parastatals. The announcement follows the arrest of provincial housing minister Neo Moerane-Mamase and her husband, former agricultural minister Max Mamase.