Springbok loose forward Joe van Niekerk will be lost to South African rugby after the World Cup, which is to be played in France in September. With the emergence of new talented players coming through the ranks, Van Niekerk has opted to take his services abroad to Northampton Saints.
Fifa president Sepp Blatter arrived in South Africa on Monday for talks with organisers of the 2010 Soccer World Cup and for his first on-site inspection of work to build and upgrade the stadiums. This is the Swiss’s first visit to the 2010 World Cup hosts since work began to build and upgrade stadiums.
Unidentified gunmen have occupied an oil pipeline-switching centre in Nigeria and are preventing local security forces from leaving, company officials said on Monday. About two dozen Nigerian workers and soldiers are being held after the attack on Sunday on a flow station in southern Bayelsa state, Italian energy giant Eni Spa said in a statement. No injuries were reported, it said.
South Africa needs to create jobs that will last beyond the 2010 Soccer World Cup, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) president Willie Madisha said on Monday. ”In some countries that have hosted the World Cup, the jobs that were created collapsed after the Cup. [We] need to discuss what happens beyond the Cup and what do we do to sustain these jobs.”
Libya’s Supreme Court on Wednesday begins hearing the final appeal of six foreign medics sentenced to death for infecting children with HIV, raising the prospect of a swift end to the eight-year crisis. Although the court is expected to uphold the death penalty, the verdict should pave the way for a compensation package to be agreed and for the sentences to be commuted.
A 111-year-old Japanese engineer born at the end of the century before last was awarded official recognition on Monday as the world’s newest oldest man, and joked he was sorry for still being alive. Tomoji Tanabe, a teetotaller who has repeatedly said that avoiding alcohol was a secret of his longevity, was given a certificate from the <i>Guinness Book of World Records</i>.
The Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been variously characterised as the bright young hope of the nation, a know-nothing upstart and a rebel without a cause. But for the sunglassed, lapel-murmuring men and women of the United States Secret Service, the senator is known simply as ”renegade”.
The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is to sue the Premier Soccer League (PSL) for breach of contract after the PSL agreed to sell exclusive television rights to the pay-channel Supersport. The PSL announced last week that it had sold the right to broadcast soccer matches to Supersport for about R1-billion.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy met his prime minister on Monday after securing an unexpectedly small parliamentary majority and losing a senior minister — setbacks that nonetheless left his reform programme on track. Sarkozy formally reappointed Prime Minister Francois Fillon, and their first task will be to find a replacement for government number two Alain Juppe.
President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF and the main opposition movement have held preliminary talks under a new regional drive to end Zimbabwe’s political and economic turmoil. The ruling party and two MDC factions sent representatives to Pretoria where they held weekend talks with South Africa’s local government minister Sydney Mufumadi.