Reporters sans Frontières on Thursday launched a website calling for a boycott of the Beijing 2008 Olympics over the human rights record of ”one of the world’s bloodiest dictatorships”. The Paris-based media watchdog said China had failed to improve its rights record since being controversially awarded the Games in 2001.
Israel won their first Olympic gold medal on Wednesday when a man whose father named him after the sea won a windsurfing class at the Athens Games, while track cyclists led Australia to equal their highest Olympic medal tally. The United States lead the medal count with 25 golds, 29 silver and 22 bronze after 11 days of competition.
Special Report: Olympics 2004
Former Champions Cup winners Real Madrid, Manchester United, Juventus and PSV Eindhoven all advanced to the group stage of the Champions League on Wednesday after getting through the competition’s third qualifying round. Juventus were the only one of the four that looked in danger of flopping after a 2-2 draw at home in the first leg.
Click on image for full-size view.
Mark Thatcher, son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was released on R2-million bail in the Wynberg Regional Court on Wednesday. Thatcher was arrested earlier on Wednesday by the Scorpions in connection with his alleged role in an alleged aborted coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.
Zimbabwe’s controversial President Robert Mugabe was voted the third-greatest African of all time, topped only by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, in a survey for New African magazine, it was announced on Wednesday.
Thirteen Ukrainians were bitten by poisonous black widow spiders in one week, the newspaper Segodnya reported on Wednesday. Last week’s incidents occurred in the southern Odessa region. All the victims were farm workers bitten while digging onions.
After successfully campaigning to have an ”immoral” Axe deodorant advert banned from television because it was too risqué, a Christian lobby group has now set its sights on an Elastoplast advertisement. According to ChristianView Network, a new Elastoplast advert promotes adultery and/or infidelity.
He might be considered the father of modern science who devised fundamental laws about gravity and motion, but Sir Isaac Newton is not even Britain’s greatest-ever physicist, according to a new ”top 10”. The number-one slot went to Joseph Swan, the 19th-century creator of the first practical light bulb.
The crashes of two jetliners minutes apart raised fresh questions on Wednesday about aviation security in Russia, but though experts admit shortcomings they said the industry is far safer than it was a decade ago. A civil aviation analyst said the planes that went down were safe and their pilots well-trained.
Alert after double jet crash