Mumbai

The International Cricket Council (ICC) will consider whether to grant official first-class status to the rebel tours of South Africa made during the country’s apartheid era at a meeting next month, an ICC official said on Friday. Teams from England, Australia, West Indies and Sri Lanka toured South Africa in the 1980s when the country was isolated by the ICC for its apartheid policy.

Former Pakistan captain Inzamam-ul-Haq and South African all-rounder Lance Klusener have signed to play in an unofficial Indian Twenty20 league, organisers said on Monday. The Pakistani trio of batsman Mohammad Yousuf, all-rounder Abdul Razzaq and batsman Imran Farhat, plus South Africa spinner Nicky Boje, have also joined the league.

A newborn Indian baby found abandoned with 26 stab wounds has survived, doctors said on Wednesday, despite a cracked skull and exposed intestines. The baby boy, who doctors said was aged between one and two days, was discovered soaked in blood at a garbage dump in India’s financial capital of Mumbai on Tuesday, they said.

The first sight for anyone flying into India’s richest city is a sea of corrugated and tarpaulin-covered roofs beside a narrow, filth-choked river. It is an aerial view of Dharavi, considered Asia’s biggest shantytown, two square kilometres of open sewers, muddy lanes and ramshackle tenements that is home to almost a million people.

A network of HIV-positive people in India has launched a campaign against illegal clinics and quacks who cheat patients with the promise of curing Aids. Patients often end up going to quacks who use fake herbal treatments because the health system is widely seen as offering poor treatment while private care is costly.

India cricket board president Sharad Pawar has suggested that Greg Chappell, who resigned as national team coach on Wednesday, should continue his involvement with the sport in the country. On Friday, the board convened a meeting into the team’s first-round exit at the World Cup and Chappell was asked to present a report.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) on Friday decided to take away the right to terminate matches from umpires and handed it instead to match referees. The recommendation, suggested by the ICC chief executives’ committee in January, was adopted at the two-day board meeting that ended in Cape Town on Friday. It takes immediate effect.

Indian police may question West Indies batsman Marlon Samuels over his links with an Indian bookmaker to whom he allegedly passed confidential team information during a one-day series in India last month. Police in India’s central city of Nagpur say they have proof of a telephone conversation between Samuels and a bookmaker on the eve of the first one-day international against India.

The role of the match referee will come under scrutiny during an International Cricket Council (ICC) chief executives’ committee meeting in the United Arab Emirates later this week. The ICC’s executive board recommended last November that a paper be prepared following the Oval Test fiasco when umpires Darrell Hair and Billy Doctrove decided Pakistan had forfeited the match against England.

Kenya’s John Kelai won the Mumbai Marathon on Sunday as thousands of the city’s residents ran alongside top athletes from Africa and Australia. Kelai clocked a time of two hours, 12 minutes and 27 seconds to beat out Ethiopians Gashaw Melese with 2:12,32 and Tariku Jufar in 2:12,49.

Women wearing the burqa and other face-concealing veils could be banned from jewellery stores in a west Indian city after a spate of thefts involving burqa-clad customers, jewellers said on Thursday. More than a dozen thefts have occurred in jewellery shops in Pune in Maharashtra state in the past two months, with at least three cases of women wearing burqas spotted by surveillance cameras as they stole gold ornaments.

Only 45 of the 38&nbsp;000 police in Mumbai applied to earn an extra 250 rupees ($5,50) a month for losing weight, a report said on Wednesday. Indian authorities offered the cash, starting in November, to police officers who kept their weight under 70kg. Ahead of the end of the offer this month less than 0,01% of the force had bothered to apply, the <i>Mumbai Mirror</i> said.

India coach Greg Chappell and former captain Saurav Ganguly have settled their differences and reached a working relationship, it was reported in the Indian media on Saturday. ”Let me make it clear that whatever happened had nothing to do with personalities. It was not about Greg Chappell or Saurav Ganguly,” Chappell was quoted in Saturday’s edition of national broadsheet Times of India.

Former India captain Saurav Ganguly is likely to be recalled for next month’s Test series in South Africa when the selection committee meets in New Delhi on Thursday. The move has been prompted by uncertainty over skipper Rahul Dravid’s fitness for the opening Test in Johannesburg due to a finger injury and a string of poor batting displays by the team in one-day cricket.

Zimbabwe will return to Test cricket in November 2007, almost two years after they volunteered to withdraw from tests because they were not competitive. Zimbabwe coach Kevin Curran announced in September the team will be ready in November next year, and that is ”realistic”, International Cricket Council president Percy Sonn said on Saturday.