Jomo Sono has all but given up any ambitions of coaching Bafana Bafana when South Africa hosts the 2010 World Cup, claiming that Local Organising Committee chief executive Danny Jordaan wants a foreign coach at the helm. Sono was interviewed last month by the South African Football Association technical committee.
American Floyd Landis won the 17th stage of the Tour de France, a 200,5km ride from St Jean de Maurienne to Morzine on Thursday. Spaniard Oscar Pereiro Sio retained the overall leader’s yellow jersey. Spaniard Carlos Sastre finished second on the stage, five minutes and 42 seconds behind Landis. France’s Christophe Moreau took third, 5:58 off the pace.
A group of 51 mainly African undocumented immigrants who have been moored off Malta for five days will be taken in by several countries, reports said on Thursday. The migrants were rescued by a Spanish fishing vessel from a boat that was adrift and had run out of food.
A tiny United States marine force landed in Lebanon on Thursday to evacuate Americans stranded by a nine-day old Israeli bombardment, which has killed more than 300 people but failed to stop Hezbollah rocket strikes on Israel. It was the US military’s first return to Lebanon since it withdrew in 1984, months after a Shi’ite Muslim suicide bomber destroyed a marine barracks, killing 241 US service personnel.
Shops reopened and cars passed through Abidjan’s previously barricades streets on Thursday following a near-complete shutdown of Côte d’Ivoire’s commercial capital by hard-line supporters of President Laurent Gbagbo. The Young Patriot militants said they had made their point with one day of protest.
Uganda said on Thursday it will organise a trip next week for relatives of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels, including LRA supremo Joseph Kony’s mother, to visit their kin at a jungle hideout. ”This is a confidence-building measure,” Ugandan delegation spokesperson Paddy Ankunda said from the southern Sudanese capital of Juba.
Two foreign TV journalists and their two Lebanese assistants were abducted by the Hezbollah militia in Beirut on Thursday on suspicion of spying, a Lebanese internal security forces officer said. "The crew was filming in the area of the Sanayeh gardens [a public park] when Hezbollah elements seized them on suspicion of being spies," the officer told the media.
Criminal charges have been laid against three Randburg teenage girls and a boy who allegedly tormented a mouse with a lit cigarette before spraying it with aerosol and setting it on fire. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) laid charges of cruelty to animals under various sections of the Animal Cruelty Act on Thursday, SPCA senior inspector Phillip Roberts said.
Chaos erupted in Reiger Park, Boksburg, when residents clashed with metro police over illegal electricity connections on Thursday. Inspector Jimmy Makobo said employees of a private electricity company, JAR, had been sent to the area to disconnect illegal connections when about 500 locals became violent.
An ill-tempered parrot left English police a vital clue as to the thief who took the bird from a pet shop. Tristand Maidment (23) pleaded guilty on Thursday to stealing a macaw named Mickey from a pet shop in Frome, south-western England, last month.