The master has gone. Spin legend Shane Warne bows out, bowled for 52.
Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne has shuffled off the mortal coil. He died in Thailand on Friday at the age of 52, felled by a suspected heart attack.
The leg-spinner arrived on the international scene in 1992, a blond-haired kid from Melbourne, but did not catch the attention of the game’s pundits right away.
It took a while, but under the captaincy of Allan Border he grew in stature and slowly became the go-to bowler when Australia needed a wicket.
After viewing the film Death on the Nile which was released this month, one just has a single question: why was this film ever made? It is a terrible effort, one that takes the plot of a well-written book by a famous author, makes ludicrous changes to suit Hollywood’s woke agenda, and then compounds that with terrible acting, hoping that the so-called big names in the film will attract a crowd.
Kenneth Branagh released one film based on an Agatha Christie novel, Murder on the Orient Express, in 2017, and chose to play Hercule Poirot himself, giving a truly terrible performance. But it looks like he wasn’t satisfied with that; he’s back as Poirot again in Death on the Nile, making one long even for the bumbling Peter Ustinov to rise from the grave and reprise the performance he gave when the same book was adapted to the big screen in 1978.
Picture courtesy Pixabay
Death on the Nile tells the tale of a couple who are on their honeymoon; the husband was formerly in love with his wife’s best friend. This woman is extremely wealthy and ends up as the first of three people murdered during a cruise down Egypt’s most famous river. The best friend tails the woman and her husband, annoying the hell out of them. Poirot happens to be on board and is given charge of the case; he solves it, with the story ending with one of his well-known denouements.
In recent years, there have been a number of remakes of old films, underlining the fact that people in the industry appear to be running out of good ideas.
That trend will be emphasised in February 2022 when a version of the Agatha Christie novel Death on the Nile is released, with Kenneth Branagh playing the role of the detective Hercule Poirot.
It is worth noting that this film was first made in 1978, with the late Peter Ustinov leading a cast full of big names: Mia Farrow, David Niven, George Kennedy, Olivia Hussey, Angela Lansbury and I.S. Johar.
After South Africa lost to New Zealand in last weekend’s 100th rugby game between the two countries, there has been much criticism of the Springboks’ style of play.
Some have dubbed it boring, others have gone so far as to say it will end up driving crowds away, something that rugby can ill afford.
Given that rugby fans, like all sports fans, are a devoted lot, the Springboks’ supporters have been equally loud in defending their team and backing the way they play.
But it was a bit puzzling to hear the captain Siya Kolisi and coach Jacques Nienabar claim that the strategy they had followed succeeded. It didn’t, unless they were aiming to lose the game.
Twenty years after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the mastermind of the attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, has still not been put on trial despite having been arrested in March 2003.
KSM, as he is known, was picked up by the Pakistani authorities in Rawalpindi. Just prior to his arrest, the other main actor in the planning of the attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, was picked up, again in Pakistan, this time in Karachi.
A report says KSM, Ramzi and three others appeared in court on Tuesday, 7 September. KSM was reported to be confident, talking to his lawyers and defying the judge’s instruction to wear a mask.
As the US marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, a theory, that can only be classified as unadulterated BS, has been advanced: the event led to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq which in turn led to the emergence of Donald Trump.
Such a narrative sits nicely with Democrats: the election of the worst US president, a Republican, was caused by the actions of another Republican president, George W. Bush.
Part of this logic — if you can call it that — is that Trump’s opposition to the wars launched by Bush put paid to the chances of his brother, Jeb, gaining the Republican nomination.
National Bird is a disturbing documentary. It isn’t new, having been made in 2016, but it outlines in stark detail the issues that are part and parcel of the drone program which the US has used to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and a number of other countries.
The use of remote killing was even seen recently after a bomb went off at Kabul Airport following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. There were boasts that two people responsible for the blast had been killed by a drone – only for the truth to emerge later.
And that was that the people killed were in no way connected to the blast. Using faulty intelligence and an over-quick finger, America had pulled the trigger again and killed innocents.
The craven manner in which Australia continues to bow before the US is borne of a deep-seated fear that Washington will again choose to interfere in Australian politics as it did in 1975.
That year, the late Gough Whitlam, who was prime minister, hinted that he might have second thoughts about renewing a lease for Pine Gap, a base in Australia’s northern parts which the Americans use for spying on other countries.
Whitlam was sacked by the governor-general John Kerr shortly thereafter. A full account of the affair is here; the CIA’s involvement has never been in doubt.
The departure of Hamish Macdonald from the position of host of the ABC’s Q+A program should, logically, have occasioned some comment from the country’s media, given that the program in question is one of the taxpayer funded channel’s flagship offerings.
That it has gone mostly unremarked is due to one reason: Macdonald is perceived as being from the left and publications who tilt towards that side of politics have remained silent as a show of solidarity.
To date, nothing has appeared to analyse why he quit what is a high-profile role in Australia. Some said he had left the program because he had experienced a lot of trolling on social media — he shut down his Twitter account though a lot of interaction for Q+A takes place through this platform — while others studiously avoided speculating on why Macdonald may have decided to return to Channel 10’s The Project.
In August, no doubt, Serena Williams will turn up at the US Open, the last tennis Grand Slam event for 2021, in the hope that she will be able to, at last, equal Australian Margaret Court’s record of 24 Grand Slam titles.
The odds are stacked against Williams, given that she has been unable to win a Grand Slam event since January 2017. That year, she won the Australian Open.
After that, she has played in 18 Grand Slam events and been unable to win any of them. In some, she has even managed to make it to the final, but then stumbled at the last hurdle.
