Wits University, again, proved to be Orlando Pirates’ hoodoo team when they knocked the Buccaneers out of the lucrative Supa 8 Cup, winning a tense quarterfinal clash 2-1 at the Oppenheimer Stadium in Klerksdorp on Sunday. The teams produced a fast-paced and evenly fought first half.
Russia’s Irina Korzhanenko was stripped of her shot-put gold medal on Monday, the first athlete of the Athens Games to lose an Olympic title because of doping. Korzhanenko, the first woman to win a gold medal at the sacred site of Ancient Olympia, tested positive for the steroid stanozolol after Wednesday’s competition.
Special Report: Olympics 2004
Justin Gatlin from the United States became one of the youngest winners of the 100m Olympic title on Sunday in one of the greatest finals of all time. The 22-year-old posted a personal best time of 9,85 seconds to beat Francis Obikwelu of Portugal, who timed a European record of 9,86, while 2000 Olympic champion Maurice Greene was third in a season’s best 9,87.
This is the question people ask themselves before almost every presidential election: Why, when the United States is teeming with brilliant and inspiring people, are its voters so often faced with a choice between two deeply unimpressive men? I would have thought the answer was pretty obvious: because deeply unimpressive men continue to be elected.
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Edvard Munch’s famous paintings The Scream and Madonna were stolen from an art museum on Sunday while stunned museum-goers watched armed men threatening the staff at gunpoint as they took the art works to a waiting car, police said. Museum visitors panicked and thought they were being attacked by terrorists.
The Sudanese government has signed an agreement with the United Nations’s migration agency ensuring that more than one million people displaced by the 18-month Darfur conflict will have the right to return home voluntarily, but only once they feel the situation is secure enough to do so.
A Malaysian woman is trying to beat a world record set by another woman in neighbouring Thailand for the longest stay in a room full of scorpions, news reports said on Sunday. Nur Malena Hassan (27) on Saturday entered a glass box with 6 000 scorpions at a shopping arcade.
Soldiers and armed police patrolled the Bangladeshi capital on Sunday, a day after more than a dozen bombs were thrown at an opposition rally, killing at least 18 people and wounding more than 300, including senior opposition members. The main opposition leader, Sheikh Hasina, escaped injury when the bombs exploded.
A car bomb exploded north of the Iraqi capital on Sunday, killing two people and injuring four others, including a deputy provincial governor, police said. Bassam al-Khadran, one of several deputy governors working in the province, was injured in the blast. Both fatalities and the three other injured were al-Khadran’s bodyguards.