With a month to go until it all kicks off again, here is the first part of the ins, outs and maybes from the transfer market. See who is in as Arsenal’s new goalkeeper, which midfielder is leaving Aston Villa and which £5-million will possibly join Birmingham City.
Click here for part two
Prisons throughout South Africa could be unguarded at the weekend as the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) prepares to defy a court interdict preventing its members from striking. The interim interdict, obtained in the Pretoria High Court on Monday evening, prevents union members from engaging in any form of action that negatively impacted on service delivery.
If you want to make sense of the third African Union summit, follow the money. The 40 heads of state gathered in Addis Ababa this week enthusiastically adopted a new vision and strategic plan defining the AU’s place in the continent. But African leaders giggled when the new AU chairperson, Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, asked for a 1 200% increase in the organisation’s current budget.
Forward enforcer AJ Venter is one of seven changes coach Jake White made to the Springboks’ team in Sydney on Friday for next week’s rugby Test against the Pacific Islands in Gosford. Venter has been in strife with judiciaries and was suspended twice for a total of 10 weeks last year, missing the World Cup in Australia.
Euro 2004 introduced some new and explosive players to the world of football. Dominic Fifield takes a look at them, from Roma’s Antonio Cassano — born a day after Italy won the 1982 World Cup in Spain — to PSV Eindhoven’s Johann Vonlanthen, included in Euro 2004 only because of injuries to Marco Streller and Leonard Thurrer.
Here it is. The big Premiership prediction. From the man who told you Holland would win Euro 2004: Chelsea will win the championship this year. Neal Collins sticks his neck out on why the Blues will win the English Premier League — and he’s prepared to cartwheel naked if they don’t.
Uefa is trying to stem the growing influx of ”foreign” footballers by forcing clubs across Europe to have up to eight home-grown players on their books and a new maximum squad size of 25. The Uefa leadership has finally brought forward detailed proposals to counter what it regards as serious problems.
Lisa has her monthly period, which means she can’t work. Her cellphone screen flashes incessantly with the names of her regulars, but she only answers her boyfriend’s calls. Her boyfriend, Pieter, knows her line of work, but condones it because he is unemployed. The M&G takes a first-hand look at SA’s burgeoning poor white problem and finds a world turned topsy turvy for a formerly favoured nation
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Morocco complained on Thursday that international aid to help it fight off a plague of locusts threatening its crops has fallen far short of what is needed. Since June 30 on average 106 000 hectares a day have been infested and swarms are heading south, in particular to Mauritania, Mali and Senegal.