Calls to strip Zimbabwe of Test status may finally have taken the pressure off Bangladesh, who yearn to gain respect as a cricket team. Long the wooden spooners of Test cricket, Bangladesh may have just turned the corner, leaving Zimbabwe to fill their shoes as the most pitiable team in the world.
South African companies are involved in dumping illegal weapons in conflict-ridden areas in Africa, an Amnesty International researcher said on Tuesday. ”In one recent example, an air-freight company operating from Johannesburg International airport helped fly several hundred tonnes of weapons into the Great Lakes region,” said Brian Wood, the organisation’s research manager.
Michael Jackson’s defence attorney sought on Tuesday to undermine the credibility of the younger brother of his accuser by presenting a Father’s Day card written by the now 14-year-old to the singer. ”When we get broken and shattered into tiny little pieces, you always heal us,” the boy wrote.
Aslan Maskhadov, the leader of the Chechen separatist movement, was killed on Tuesday during a raid by Russian special forces. In a well coordinated media operation, his corpse was shown on the Russian TV channel NTV lying in a pool of blood in the courtyard of the house in whose basement he had been hiding.
During the headier days of his 24 years as CBS news anchor, Dan Rather was called the ”voice of God” of American prime-time television. But when he makes his final send-off on Wednesday night, his exit will be rather less exalted. His departure is the result of a flawed report last September on United State President George Bush’s service in the Texas air national guard.
The Zimbabwean Attorney General has filed an appeal against the early release of 62 alleged South African mercenaries, South African Broadcasting Corporation radio news reported on Tuesday night. The Zimbabwean High Court last week reduced their sentences by four months, meaning that they could be released immediately.
To date, there are just seven Land Rover Defender 147s on our roads, and one is owned by Kian Barker of Shakabarker tours in St Lucia. With a zoology degree and honours in ichthyology, Barker is nobody’s monkey and he soon realised that to provide his guests with the ultimate turtle egg laying/ hatching experience, he needed a very different vehicle.
Spare a thought for the humble tyre. Its entire working life is spent exposed to the elements, it gets dragged along the roughest of road surfaces with scant regard for its well-being, and it receives little, if any, tender loving care. Yet these rubber hoops are what keep our cars and our families safe on the road.
I wish it were possible to storm the gates of neo-liberal state power in this country, dominated by the ruling African National Congress, and declare a workers’ socialist republic. But I know with certainty that at least for the next decade there will be no such prospect. The ANC is still deeply rooted among the majority black working class and it will take a long time to uproot this support.
There is a global consensus on the importance of developing trade and the fact that only the World Trade Organisation (WTO), by realising the November 2001 Doha Development Agenda, can push through the development-friendly reforms that are urgently needed. World Trade Organisation secretary general Supachai Panitchpakdi argues that only the WTO can facilitate fair trade.