Andre Agassi defeated Alberto Martin of Spain 6-4, 6-2 in the first round of the Rogers Cup on Monday. The fourth-seeded Agassi finessed his way from the baseline with steady groundstrokes, capitalising on mistakes by his 26-year-old opponent.
New Zealand has delayed until Wednesday the naming of its team to play Australia in a Tri-Nations rugby match due to injury concerns within the squad. Coach Graham Henry said captain and centre Tana Umaga was only a 50-50 chance of taking part in the match on Saturday at the former Olympic stadium in Sydney.
South African Rugby’s vice-president, Mike Stofile, is considering resignation, he told the Daily Dispatch newspaper on Monday. The revelation follows the resignation of Andre Markgraaff, who quit as deputy president after accusing SA Rugby president Brian van Rooyen of side-lining him from his duties.
Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grand‒father by Gao Xingjian (Harper Perennial) In the title story, the author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, longs for his childhood village, now asphalted over, and his grandfather, who made fishing rods of bamboo. It is one of six stories written between 1989 and 1996, […]
Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer was buried on Monday as fans mourned the passing of the Buena Vista Social Club crooner, who died just days after coming back from a tour in Europe. About 200 relatives and friends attended the simple but evocative ceremony at Havana’s Colon cemetery, during which Ferrer’s bolero Mil congojas played in the background.
A Hong Kong official said one of the territory’s tiny islands could make a killing with a novel theme park based on its unsavoury reputation as a suicide spot, a media report said on Tuesday. The morbid suggestion to create a ghost-town attraction where guests were dared to spend the night in ”haunted flats” came at a meeting of local leaders on little Cheung Chau island.
Messages on a telephone answering machine told of a Durbanville woman’s desperate attempts to warn her neighbour that intruders had entered his home, the Cape High court heard on Monday. Durbanville resident Pieter Theron told Judge Siraj Desai he found two messages on his answering machine, from the widow of retired Dutch Reformed Church pastor, Pietie Victor.
Government troops in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo killed 21 out of a group of militia fighters who attacked them at the weekend, an officer of the DRC army said on Monday. Colonel Janvier Mayanga wa Kishuba said the deaths took place on Saturday during clashes with so-called Mai-Mai guerillas who are allied to ethnic Hutu rebels from nearby Rwanda.
Japan was plunged into political turmoil on Monday when the Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, was pushed into calling a snap election that risks destroying his party. The crisis was prompted by radical plans to privatise the post office, which Koizumi has put at the heart of a structural reform programme.
A new study sheds new light on euthanasia in The Netherlands, the first country to legalise it for terminally ill people, finding that nearly one in eight adult patients who requested mercy killings decided not to go through with it. Nearly half of the euthanasia requests were carried out.