South Africans have cause for the gravest possible misgivings about the labyrinthine oil deal exposed in this edition of the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>. If it had panned out as projected, the deal would have held major benefits for South Africa.
Last week should have been a triumphant one for world cycling champion Mario Cipollini. But injury was piled on top of insult as Italy’s most charismatic cyclist slid across the road at 48kph on his backside, just 160m from the finish line in the little Veneto town of San Donà di Piave. With bruising to his ribs and back, Cipollini was unable to complete the race.
This time last year there was a general feeling of well-being after the announcement of Rudolph Straeuli’s first squad as Springbok coach.
The Blue Bulls provincial women’s rugby team, arguably the strongest women’s side in the country, will take on the visiting English development side in a friendly match at Loftus this Saturday.
This week’s lavish, seven-day long party, which began on Tuesday, will portray Russia’s cultural capital at its best for its third centenary. But last week the local administration burned to the ground a dozen garden sheds where locals grow subsistence crops, lest signs of real life in Russia disturb the foreign guests.
It will be a Cape Town derby with a twist when Ajax Cape Town plays Santos at the Athlone stadium on Saturday in the final of the Absa Cup.
Tony Blair’s post-war tour of Iraq ran into trouble before he had even set foot in the country when his former foreign minister, Robin Cook, served notice that the British prime minister faced a growing crisis over the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction.
They say Monaco is the sort of place you either love or hate, and my mind was made up years ago by a late-night visit to one of the principality’s upmarket nightclubs. Maybe the serried ranks of open-top Bentleys, Aston Martins and Ferraris parked outside should have given a clue to what lay ahead, but you know how it is after a meal and a couple of glasses of wine – in for a penny, in for a pound and all that sort of thing.
The European Union’s first Constitution, creating a union president and foreign minister, has been 15 tortuous months in the making in Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s Convention.
In the years before the government was overthrown, Uday al-Ta’ai controlled the state’s vast but crude propaganda machine. As director general of the Ministry of Information he was an ultra-loyal Ba’athist, the man responsible for masterminding the censorship, harassment and persecution of foreign journalists.