It will become one of those great quiz questions on South African soccer in years to come. Which team beat runaway champions Mamelodi Sundowns in four out of four matches in the 2006/07 Premier Soccer League season? The answer, of course, is Ajax Cape Town, who have been like a breath of fresh air this campaign.
Paul Wolfowitz lost his battle to hang on to his job as president of the World Bank on Thursday, announcing his resignation after a bitter international controversy. However, he managed to extract a statement from the bank’s board exonerating him for wrongdoing in engineering a generous pay rise for his partner.
It is estimated that about 70% of South African football fans support either Kaizer Chiefs or Orlando Pirates, which begs the question: Are the Soweto giants really good for our soccer? The 2006/07 season has been described as boring, lacking intensity and poor in quality, but for me this has been one of the more interesting campaigns in recent times.
It is not <i>Slaughterhouse 5</i>, or <i>Catch-22</i>; it is not even <i>The Magnificent Seven</i>. It is neither Zuckerman, nor Everyman. It is <i>Spider-Man 3</i>, and no more. There is a film, in which there appears a man, who is also a spider, and he has appeared three times. That is all.
Say what you like about South Africa’s first five months at the United Nations Security Council, the country hasn’t suffered from stage fright. Voting against a resolution to bring the appalling human rights record of the Burmese junta under council scrutiny laid down a marker early on.
South African rugby this week found itself once again dancing to the strains of a political orchestra
"We believe the concept of identity through your avatar will span the web. We are going to seek to enable that. Technology-wise, it’s only about 18 months away." Philip Rosedale, founder of virtual world <i>Second Life</i>, talks about avatars, dictatorship, virtual economies and the next big step for his creation.
When South African Grant Ruffel and his Argentinian friend Gaston Bernal bought the <i>Zanj</i> sailing yacht in 1998, their main objective was to set up surf charters. Little did the two skippers know that six eventful years later they would be combing the bottom of the ocean, looking for ancient shipwrecks, lost treasures and artefacts.
Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski revealed on Thursday that he doesn’t have a bank account and instead hands his salary over to his mother. "I still don’t have a bank account," the 57-year-old conservative premier said in an interview with the weekly news magazine, <i>Wprost</i>. "I’m not joking. I keep my money in Mum’s account," he said.
Britain-based brewer SABMiller said on Thursday that net profit climbed by almost 15% during its fiscal year, but gains were limited by a disappointing performance in North America. SABMiller said that net profit increased by 14,5% to $1,649-billion in the year to March 31 from the same period 12 months earlier, according to an official earnings release.
DaimlerChrysler’s sale of its Chrysler division to Cerberus Capital Management will not adversely affect customers of the brand in South Africa, says Jeff Osborne, CEO of the Retail Motor Industry Organisation of South Africa (RMI). He says the acquisition is regarded by the RMI as a positive move.
A three-week wave of cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia is causing alarm across the Western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications. Nato has dispatched cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.
Gaza slid deeper into a factional war on Wednesday as another 16 people died in gun battles between rival armed groups. Palestinians held rallies in Ramallah, in the West Bank, and in Gaza City protesting against the violence and calling for a halt to a wave of killing that has claimed 41 lives in the past four days.
Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi escaped unharmed after his convoy hit a landmine that failed to explode in northern Mogadishu, a Somali official said on Thursday. Gedi was returning from a ceremony at the capital’s main airport for the departure of the bodies of four Ugandan African Union peacekeepers killed the previous day.
A crucial meeting of the World Bank’s executive board adjourned on Wednesday night without a decision on Paul Wolfowitz’s future as president — while outside the boardroom the parties manoeuvred to resolve the controversy. Wolfowitz is striving to negotiate a deal that will allow him to resign while passing some of the blame on to the bank.
Britain’s Prince Harry will not be sent to serve in Iraq after military commanders decided it would be too dangerous, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said on Wednesday. Harry (22), the third in line to the throne and a junior officer in the army, had been due to be deployed to Basra, in southern Iraq, with his Blues and Royals regiment.
Indian MPs demanded protection on Wednesday from hordes of monkeys that have invaded the Parliament building, ministries and departments in the national capital. The debate coincided with court orders on Wednesday to transport captured monkeys from New Delhi to a nearby wildlife sanctuary.
A debate raging over the morals of Hong Kong’s racy media took a bizarre twist on Wednesday with revelations that a decency watchdog had been flooded with obscenity complaints about the Bible. The Television and Entertainments Licensing Authority said it had received 208 complaints that text within the holy book was indecent.
Small Aids organisations in Malawi are being monitored after a recent move by the National Aids Commission to suspend financial aid.
Jacques Chirac bade goodbye to the office of the French president but not the international spotlight on Tuesday night as he prepared to launch a private foundation to promote world peace. After urging the country to unite and "respect diversity" in the last of his TV presidential addresses, he on Wednesday hands power to his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
A drought affecting several Chinese provinces has left 4,8-million people short of drinking water, state media reported on Wednesday, citing the state drought-relief headquarters. Eleven million hectares of crops have also been affected by drought in several provinces, the <i>China Daily</i> reported.
Zimbabwean police have detained the lawyer of Briton Simon Mann, who is fighting his extradition to Equatorial Guinea, a colleague said on Tuesday. Law Society of Zimbabwe president Beatrice Mtetwa said that Mann’s lawyer, Jonathan Samkange, was picked up by police on Monday night for allegedly bringing a witness into the country under false pretences.
Fitch Ratings said on Tuesday that the South African telecommunications industry would benefit from a more competitive market-driven approach to development. "The government needs to shift away from its established managed-liberalisation strategy, which has yet to achieve its policy objectives for the industry," it said.
Santam is set to begin implementing its R915-million broad-based black economic empowerment (BEE) scheme following the fulfilment of all remaining conditions precedent this week. The process that will see 10% of the short-term insurer’s shares sold to a range of previously disadvantaged individuals.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday said he was ready to meet Arab leaders to discuss their peace initiative but that no conditions should be set in advance. "I invite these 22 leaders of the Arab nation that are ready to make that kind of peace with Israel to come, whenever they want, to sit down with us and start to talk," Olmert said in Jordan.
In the same week that a major climate conference said that gas-emission cuts need to be both drastic and urgent, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk gave his go-ahead for a giant new Eskom coal-fired power station. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that the world has just 10 years to implement new strategies to combat global warming.
The Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), attached to the University of Tokyo, is Japan’s foremost research organisation. It focuses primarily on the fields of science and technology. This month the centre celebrates its 20th anniversary, and its founding principles include an interdisciplinary approach.
The events of September 11 2001, the subsequent "war on terror" and the Iraq war have sorely tested academic freedom in the United States as numerous controversies, some of them about September 11 itself and its aftermath, have arisen. Evidence suggests that the past six years have witnessed systematic attempts to intervene in academic affairs on campuses throughout the US.
Watching Kader Asmal deliver his pronouncement last December on the now ex-ANC chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe got me to thinking about the vicissitudes of power in South African politics. It is all well and good that mechanisms such as the national disciplinary committee exist in order to curtail excess, but there was something embarrassingly slimy about the whole process.
There has been much criticism of the role of the application of registration and quality-assurance legi slation in higher education in the demise of private and overseas universities operating in South Africa. Arguments have ranged from the free market to academic freedom to an overly defensive public provider sector.
Deputies and experts attending the Pan African Parliament on Monday called for Western countries to help reverse the environmental damage to the continent that they had helped create. "This problem is generated by countries in the West," said the African Union Commission’s rural development and agriculture commission director Babagana Ahmadu.
I could swear I saw French president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy wince a couple of times as a small woman with a big voice launched into the French national anthem right after his acceptance speech. Amplified to fill the open air stadium where Sarkozy’s supporters had gathered in rapturous self-congratulation, the woman belted out the words that had been born out of the bloody French revolution of 1789.