Seven months after a scandal that shook the Athens Olympics, Greek sprinters Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou were cleared of evading drug tests in a surprise decision that could be challenged by the International Association of Athletics Federations. A Greek sporting tribunal voted 4-1 to clear the runners on Friday.
Eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi withdrew from the quarterfinals of the Indian Wells ATP Masters Series event in California on Friday with a foot injury. The 34-year-old American said he woke up on Friday with an extremely sore left toe, which made it impossible for him to play against Australian Lleyton Hewitt.
The Northern Bulls ripped apart the form book as they scored their first win of the season with an upset 21-12 victory over the previously unbeaten Wellington Hurricanes in New Zealand on Saturday. There were two tries apiece but the difference was with the intensity of the Bulls’ defence.
Thirty guests tucked into a sheep-shaped cake at a 21st birthday party for a merino who may have set a longevity record for his kind in Australia or even the world, news reports said on Saturday. ”We’ve never ever had a sheep as old as George,” said New South Wales farmer Myra Tolhurst.
A car bomb wrecked the front of a building in a predominantly Christian suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, early on Saturday, wounding nine people, hospital officials said. The motive and target of the bombing were not immediately clear. A local legislator called it an act of terrorism that could be an attempt to destabilise the country.
The Public Service Accountability Monitor has called for the immediate suspension of Eastern Cape housing minister Neo Moerane-Mamase following her arrest on Friday morning for corruption. Mamase and her husband, Max Mamase, were arrested on Friday morning by the joint anti-corruption task team.
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Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe on Friday urged his supporters to vote for his party’s candidates in crunch upcoming parliamentary elections regardless of any of its shortcomings. ”It doesn’t matter that the party may have failed to fulfil certain promises, such as employment,” Mugabe said.
A three-year-old girl was raped and murdered at the Kwa-Masiza hostel in Sebokeng on Saturday morning, Vaal Rand police said. The child was murdered after the mother (23) left her alone to visit her boyfriend at about 3am, Superintendent Maria Mazibuko said.
The main topic of sartorial debate inside the courtroom at the Michael Jackson trial came not with the king of pop’s unlikely arrival in a pair of blue pyjama bottoms, but a few days earlier. The whisper rolled through the 30 or so reporters squeezed into the small municipal court as Jackson strode in on the sixth day of the trial.
At the same time that Sergeant Kevin Benderman’s unit was called up for a second tour in Iraq with the Third Infantry Division, two soldiers tried to kill themselves and another had a relative shoot him in the leg. Seventeen went awol or ran off to Canada, and Benderman defied nine years of military training and followed his conscience.