Killing threads

[costas at meezon.com]

I have th program below. How does one go about kill a thread once
started? Why is there no method for killing threads? I thought del
would do it but obviously it doesn't.

Also the print in the run method does not print until a sys.exit() is
executed.

# Note: You cannot CTRL-BREAK out of this program in PythonWin.
# You have to kill it using the task manager.

import threading
import time
import sys

class wasteTime(threading.Thread):

    def run(self):    
        # run forever
        while 1:
            print time.time()
            time.sleep(1)

startTime=time.time()
th=wasteTime()
th.start()

while 1:
    time.sleep(0.5)
    if time.time()>startTime+5:
        # I want to kill the th thread right here.
        del th
        sys.exit()


TIA

Costas