Scotland’s Colin McRae won Sunday’s third stage of the Dakar Rally to take the overall lead in the two-continent race as the event completed its route through Spain and headed to Africa. South Africa’s Giniel de Villiers was third, two seconds back, with Frenchman Stephane Peterhansel fourth, another five seconds back.
West Indies captain Brian Lara was on Monday given the official all-clear to play for the Rest of the World against an Asian XI in a tsunami-relief cricket match in Melbourne on January 10. Lara, along with teammates Chris Gayle and Dwayne Bravo, was given the go-ahead by team management.
Gary Younge tracks down Zane, the bestselling author of black erotica in the United States who has hitherto kept her identity a secret. To call her work porn, says Zane, would be inaccurate: ”Porn is just straight sex. My books have a story. If you took the sex out of it, you’d still have the story.”
The announcement by the Mpumalanga education MEC of planned disciplinary action against the whistleblower who revealed cheating in the province’s matric exams was outrageous, the Democratic Alliance said on Sunday.
The bodies of two more South Africans have been found in Thailand, bringing the total number of tsunami deaths to seven, the Department of Foreign Affairs said on Monday. Spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa said the department is working with the families of the victims to arrange when to repatriate the bodies to South Africa.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/content/l3_fl2.asp?cg=tsunami%20disaster&o=194303">Tsunami disaster special report</a>
A fire raged through part of Equatorial Guinea’s capital and destroyed about 100 homes and left almost 1 000 people homeless, but claimed no lives, national radio reported on Monday. A first house in the impoverished Ela Nguema district of the tropical Central African city caught fire when a candle set light to a pile of clothes.
French journalist Georges Malbrunot, who was released just before Christmas after four months in captivity in Iraq, saw in the new year in France with a sense of relief that he was not British. ”On Planet Bin Laden, they look first at your nationality. Had we been British – or from another coalition country – we would have been decapitated within days.”
At a texas school, the talk is all about sex. Or, rather, about how you absolutely must not do it or anything close to it outside wedlock. It is part of the sexual revolution in US schools called Abstinence-Only Until Marriage, a programme being cascaded with funding from the Bush administration.
Six injured South African survivors of the tsunami in Thailand arrived at Lanseria International Airport on board a rescue flight from Bangkok on Saturday night, as one of the biggest relief efforts ever seen finally cranked into action, with world aid pledges passing the -billion mark.
The Zimbabwe government has denied media reports that controversial information minister Jonathan Moyo has tendered his resignation to acting president Joyce Mujuru. Moyo allegedly sent his resignation by fax from Kenya, where he is on holiday, but Mujuru reportedly refused to accept it.