Top seed Roger Federer and Russian golden girl Maria Sharapova lifted the Paris gloom on Wednesday when they shrugged off the bitter cold and rain-choked skies to reach the French Open third round. And women’s top seed Amelie Mauresmo recovered from second set jitters before overpowering Russia’s Vera Dushevina of 6-1, 7-6 (7/5).
The South African Communist Party (SACP) said on Thursday it was ”deeply disturbed” by the comments of the Cabinet in response to the SACP’s central committee discussion document. ”The dismissal of the genuine observations of the central committee of the SACP as a ‘false assertions’ and ‘fulminations of the imagination’ demonstrates a rather disturbing intolerance towards well-considered criticism, said the party.
Tickets for this year’s Australia-England Ashes Test cricket series were snapped up at a rate of ten per second when sales opened in Sydney on Thursday, Cricket Australia (CA) said. CA said tickets for the five Ashes Tests had sold faster than for any other cricket series held here, with 182 000 bought on the first day.
South Africa has offered to transfer military technology to Turkey in a bid to get ahead of competitors in a ,5-billion tender for 91 attack helicopters for the army. ”There would be a high level of sharing in transfer of technology and intellectual property rights”, said South African Minister of Public Enterprises Alec Erwin.
Shares of the Bank of China rose more than 14% by midday on Thursday during their debut on Hong Kong’s stock market, with indications of strong demand from investors around the globe eager to tap into the country’s galloping economy. The bank raised ,7-billion in an initial public offering — the world’s biggest in six years — that valued the shares at HK,95 each.
As France’s Jacques Chirac enters the final year of his presidency, a spoof documentary out this week looks set to become an instant hit with its caustic look at his 40-year rise to power. Dans la peau de Jacques Chirac, a 90-minute collage of archive clips irreverently narrated by a Chirac impersonator, screened to hoots of laughter in Paris on Wednesday.
The African Union expressed "deep regret" on Thursday that hold-out Darfur rebel groups had failed to meet a midnight deadline to sign a peace deal for the troubled western Sudanese region. At the same time it held out hope that dissident factions of the two groups would accept the Darfur Peace Agreement.
After a month of heated debate punctuated by a walk-out by female lawmakers, Kenya’s predominantly male national assembly on Wednesday approved a watered-down version of new sex-crimes legislation. The law boosts penalties for rapists and other sex offenders but drops provisions from earlier drafts that rights activists had deemed key.
The United Nations has appealed for a near doubling of emergency aid to the Palestinian territories to alleviate a crippling economic crisis after the freezing of foreign funds to the Hamas government and Israeli sanctions against the Palestinians.
There comes a time, in the middle of every Cannes festival, when everyone asks themselves the same question. What’s the film we’re all talking about? What has grabbed us by the lapels? In previous years, it’s been Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, or Gaspar Noe’s rape-revenge nightmare Irreversible, or Michael Haneke’s surveillance thriller Hidden. And this […]