ANDREW MUCHINERIPI, Johannesburg | Tuesday 10.30am. COINING the phrase “Simply unbelievable” to describe the Rothmans Cup was a stroke of ironic wit that no copy writer had the foresight to know would be so pertinent this season. In a new twist to a tangled soccer year, Jomo Cosmos have been booted out of the lucrative […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 12.30pm. RAJA Casablanca of Morocco host Esperance of Tunisia this weekend in the first leg of a dream African Champions League final. Apart from the glory of winning the premier club competition on the continent, the winners qualify for the first world championship finals and matches against giants like Real […]

AT least four members of Rwanda’s national football team, including its captain, have absconded in Germany, apparently in the hope of playing for professional teams in Belgium, Rwandan officials said on Tuesday. Nicholas Ntare, secretary-general of the Rwanda Amateur Football Association which is responsible for the team, said the players failed to show up at […]

STRIKER Fary Faye scored twice as Senegal outclassed weakened Cote d’Ivoire 3-0 at the weekend in a warm-up match for the 2000 African Nations Cup. Faye from Portuguese Beira Mar club struck after 15 and 36 minutes for the Lions and Mamadou Diallo applied the final blow a minute before the final whistle in Dakar. […]

PHILIPE BERNES-LASSERRE, Lagos | Tuesday 3.15pm TROOPS poured into the oil-producing region of southern Nigeria on Monday in a military operation a senior official said is aimed at averting a “total breakdown of law and order”. Dozens of truckloads of heavily-armed soldiers drove into the Bayelsa State capital Yenagoa over the weekend and moved on […]

TURKEYS’s national oil and gas comany has sealed an agreement with its Libyan counterpart to explore and drill oil in the North African country. Under the agreement, the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) will work in two of the 12 fields which Tripoli opened for exploration in 1995. The Libyan parliament is expected to ratify the […]

SOUTH African allrounder Jacques Kallis will not bowl in the first two Tests against England this summer. Kallis is suffering from severe tendonitis of the left knee, and will probably only bowl in the third Test at Kingsmead on Boxing Day. Kallis was advised not to bowl by specialist, Spike Eramsus, who examined him in […]

DENIS BARNETT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 5.00pm. WASHINGTON’s UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke will visit South Africa early next month as part of a multi-state African tour focusing on security and peacekeeping, diplomats said on Tuesday. Details of the trip are still being finalised but it will include visits to countries involved in the conflict in the […]

GHANA will meet Brazil in the semi-finals of the world under-17 soccer championship in New Zealand on Wednesday. Finalists in each of the last two tournaments, the two are facing off earlier this time because of the Brazilians’ unaccustomed second placing in Group C, won by a solid Australian team. In the other semi-final game […]

SOME four million Ethiopians are infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS. The recently released government statistics were made public 17 months after the United Nations warned that more than 9% of the adult population of Ethiopia is HIV-positive. Vice-Minister of Information and Culture Besrat Geshaw noted that with an estimated four million people […]