Auckland Blues centre Rua Tipoki was suspended for 16 weeks on Saturday after being found guilty of striking Western Force flyhalf James Hilgendorf in their Super 14 rugby match. The punishment, handed down at a judicial committee hearing, is the heaviest ever imposed on a New Zealand player by a Sanzar panel.
Pope Benedict XVI is trying to combat efforts to rehabilitate Christianity’s most hated villain after the presentation this month of a newly discovered ”gospel according to Judas”. In his first Easter sermon at St Peter’s Basilica, the German pope said the 13th apostle was a greedy liar: ”He evaluated Jesus in terms of power and success. For him, only power and success were real. Love didn’t count.”
All Blacks flyhalf Daniel Carter became the ninth player to reach 600 points in super rugby, surpassing 150 points for the season, as the Canterbury Crusaders beat South Africa’s Cheetahs 53-17 in a Super 14 match on Saturday. Carter scored two tries, kicked two penalties and converted six of the Crusaders’ seven tries to take 28 points from the match.
Britons, Europe’s biggest chocoholics, were set to have a cracking good time over Easter by splashing out on about 80-million Easter eggs, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said on Good Friday. A total of £520-million (-million) was to be spent on chocolate over the four-day weekend as the BRC forecast that Britons were set to blow £2,8-billion in total on food and drink.
The Sudanese foreign ministry will ask the Chadian ambassador to explain his government’s decision to severe diplomatic relations with Khartoum, a spokesperson said on Friday. Earlier on Friday, Chadian President Idriss Déby said in N’djamena his country was breaking ties with neighbouring Sudan, which he has accused of backing a rebel bid to topple him.
United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was directly linked to prisoner abuse for the first time yesterday, when it emerged he had been ”personally involved” in a Guantánamo Bay interrogation found by military investigators to have been ”degrading and abusive”.
Iran said on Friday it could defeat any American military action over its controversial nuclear drive, in one of the Islamic regime’s boldest challenges yet to the United States. ”You can start a war but it won’t be you who finishes it,” said General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the head of the Revolutionary Guards and among the regime’s most powerful figures.
The 1970s gave us the six-million-dollar man. Thirty years and quite a bit of inflation later we have the six-billion-dollar human: not a physical cyborg as such, instead an umbrella term for the latest developments in the growing field of technology for human enhancement.
”Darling, please don’t send me any more pasta al forno. You can send me all the cheese you want.” These words of domesticity, written between a husband and wife, betray little of the couple’s extraordinary story. The identity of the author was revealed this week as Bernardo Provenzano — the mafia boss of bosses, a man police had been hunting for 43 years.
As far as the South African schools’ curriculum is concerned, life evolved, it was not designed. The topics it covers include the Africa-cradle-of-mankind thesis, which reflects a widespread scientific consensus, and which is also likely to enjoy popular appeal in Africa, and population genetics.