Rain gave South Africa a glimmer of hope as they looked to escape with a draw in the second and final Test against Sri Lanka. South Africa were 21-2 at close as the Sri Lankan new-ball bowlers came up with incisive spells. But rain, which had washed out the first two sessions, came back to force an early closure.
South African defender Lucas Radebe’s career could be over after he suffered a suspected rupture of the Achilles’ tendon during Leeds United’s goalless draw at Wolves on Saturday. The 35-year-old was carried off on a stretcher after extended treatment on the pitch 18 minutes into the game at Molineux.
Ryan Cox, after an aggressive race up front, was the only survivor among South Africa’s team of three in a thrilling 224km Olympic Games road race through the city streets of Athens that was won by Paolo Bettini of Italy on Saturday.
Hestrie Cloete, South Africa’s golden girl at the Athens Olympics, had to bus into the athlete’s Olympic Village when she was left stranded at the airport in a culmination of communication problems in the SA Olympic camp.
The charred bodies of women and children lay heaped inside a dozen torched huts in the Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi on Saturday, where nearly 159 people were killed in an overnight attack. The victims were shot, hacked to death with machetes or burnt inside their homes, during a raid on the camp near the capital Bujumbura.
Zambia’s former finance minister Katele Kalumba and three ex-senior treasury officials have been arrested and charged with abuse of office and corruption involving -million. Kalumba has been included in the ongoing corruption case where ex-aides of former president Frederick Chiluba have been put on trial on corruption charges.
Former South African president FW de Klerk has relinquished his New National Party membership saying the party had gone too far in merging with the ruling African National Congress. ”I am not considering joining the ANC and shall decide in due course for what party I shall vote,” he said.
Japan’s second largest power company is to close all 11 of its nuclear reactors to carry out urgent safety checks after an accident at one of its plants on Monday in which four workers died and seven others were injured.
For years the only link between Ireland and the world’s most famous sunken lost city was the Irish-American actor Patrick Duffy, who played the Man from Atlantis in the cult 70s television show. But now a geographer has claimed that Atlantis was actually Ireland.
A contingent of Rwandan troops heads to Darfur this weekend — the first foreign soldiers to deploy in western Sudan, where thousands of people have been killed in violence some are calling a genocide. Their main mission is to protect the 80 African Union observers already in the country.