The Vodacom Challenge kicks off this weekend in Mmabatho, featuring two of the South African’s best-supported football teams against the might of Congo in what has traditionally become the precursor of things to come in the season for the local sides.
Japan and the United Kingdom this week intensified the global diplomatic pressure on Myanmar to free the detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as the military junta dismissed British accusations that she is being held in the nation’s most notorious prison.
The road to Monrovia is a bloodstained path strewn with surreal violence. More than 400 000 people have been killed and millions displaced in a tangled regional conflict characterised by extreme violence.
As the verbal fisticuffs between Thabo Mbeki and Tony Leon last week showed, South Africa has not put its race dilemmas to bed. This week we kick off a race debate to get the dinner-table talk and the whispers into the open.
While the government holds up its mother-to-child HIV-transmission prevention programme as the continent’s largest, it is turning into a shambles in many provinces.
Two stories in the news this week had the manne shaking their heads about people in public service being overzealous in the execution of their duties.
A plaque at the entrance to the Baghdad police academy reads: ”Your gun is your honour, so keep it.” Underneath it on Wednesday someone had scrawled: ”I needed some money, so I sold it.”
Iran may have struck a more cooperative tone over the al-Qaeda suspects in its custody in return for France cracking down on exiled opposition groups, Tehran newspapers reported this week.
For the first time in history, the organisers of the Berg River Canoe Marathon have been forced into making dramatic changes to the course for the four day classic canoeing race, as a result of the drought gripping the Western Cape.
Graeme Smith is surely aware that his honeymoon period as South African cricket captain is rapidly coming to a close but the relaxed, confident figure he is cutting in England would hardly suggest it.