With just more that two months to go to the kickoff of the Fifa Soccer World Cup in South Africa, the local backlash against the autocratic and bulldozing approach by the world football governing body is gaining momentum. In the latest incident, South African Airways (SAA) announced at the end of March that it was terminating its contract with Match, the official ticketing agency for Fifa, due to a reduction of seats requested - from 45 000 to 1 000 - by the ticketing company.

The embattled South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya is on another collision course with the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and Athletics South Africa. This comes after she was prohibited from taking part in the fifth meeting in the Yellow Pages Series in Stellenbosch last week. Semenya, the South African and world women's 800-metre champion, turned up at the track in Coetzenburg Stadium, accompanied by her legal representative and coach, and demanded to be allowed to run after her career had been put on hold for many months by the two athletics governing bodies.

Is the controversial song urging the killing of “Boers” truly part of the ANC’s liberation struggle heritage, or are such claims simply an ingenuous, or perhaps sinister, attempt by the ANC leadership to defend its Youth League leader Julius Malema by distorting the historical truth? Or is the ANC itself trying to rewrite history after it accused the courts of doing so when two successive court rulings found the song to incite racial hatred – findings in line with one already made by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) as long ago as 2003? 

The dilemma around environmental concerns versus developmental needs, to name but one, in the Eskom loan application to be considered by the World Bank this week is symptomatic of the challenges confronting communities across the globe to come to grips with the realities of a changing energy environment and with the needs to adapt to predicted climate change. So broad are the predicted changes awaiting mankind that many commentators predict a new cultural era.

The World Bank’s decision, due on Thursday this week, whether to give Eskom a $3.75-billion loan - the bulk of which will be used to complete its 4 800MW Medupi coal-fired power station in Limpopo, with the balance to be invested in wind and concentrated solar power projects - could have a telling influence on the country’s economic development in the immediate years to come. If activist environmental groups have their way, disputed global long-term environmental benefits will get preference over domestic short- to medium-term economic necessity.

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As the largest scientific experiment in human history practically got under way finally on 30 March this year at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva on the border between Switzerland and France, traditional religion as we know it may be facing its greatest challenge in history. One of the first core goals of the multinational experiment, which has been 25 years in the planning, is to prove (or disprove) the existence of a single particle known as the Higgs boson – a speck so precious that it has come to be called "The God Particle", a reference to the theory that Higgs gives mass to all matter in the cosmos.

Never, since the slaying of struggle icon Chris Hani by right-wing extremists just days short of 17 years ago in April 1993, has South Africa been more in danger of descending into violent political conflict than after the murder this weekend of the leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), Eugene Terre'Blanche. To date, the reaction and commentary from most quarters has been remarkably restrained, but how well the country gets through this will depend largely on how well leaders of all persuasions succeed in keeping the rhetoric of hot-headed followers toned down.

Tiger Woods has had to endure public humiliation and intense scrutiny after his extramarital affairs and he has had to answer scores of questions by the media on that infamous crash close to his residence that took place in November last year. But the ultimate question this week will be asked by Augusta, the host of the Masters tournament (the first Grand Slam event of the year) as well as by South Africa’s Ernie Els.