Andrew Smith ventures into Silicon Valley to meet the technoseers who think supercomputers have made man obsolete.
Ritz, glitz and plenty of bad taste are the lures used to separate gamblers and shoppers from their hard-earned cash at Montecasino.
ETHIOPIA says it will not withdraw its army from inside Eritrea until the Asmara government honoured its own redeployment commitments. The Defence Ministry said Ethiopia would consider withdrawing after a United Nations peacekeeping mission had deployed along the border and confirmed the geography of a temporary security zone. Ethiopia’s army holds large chunks of undisputed […]
THE International Monetary Fund has given final approval to a three-year loan totalling $76m for Niger to help that country’s anti-poverty efforts. The IMF’s executive board acted after the World Bank last week approved Niger’s interim poverty reduction plan. Per capita income in Niger has fallen by 40% over the last two decades, the IMF […]
THE Zimbabwe government has laid off more than 2_000 civil servants in ongoing moves to streamline the public sector, the state workers union said. Thousands of workers from the education ministry were handed letters of termination when they turned up for work this week, the Government Workers Association (GWA) said. Although civil servants were notified […]
THE first passenger train in over two years this week travelled along a key railway line in the central African state of Congo. The train on the 512km Congo-Ocean line, linking the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noire to the capital Brazzaville, carried 396 passengers for an overnight run that took 12 hours. Freight services on the […]
TUNISIA’S communications ministry has cut Internet subscription rates in half, and says privatisation of the telecommunications sector will probably begin this year. Monthly charges for subscribing to the Internet for a family dropped from 21 dinars ($15) to 10 dinars ($7), while professional subcribers saw their fees reduced from about $33 to $14 a month, […]
SOUTH African security guards have ended an often-violent 17-day strike after five mainly black employer organisations reached an agreement with nine unions. A mediator said the agreement provided for reducing the working week to 50 hours, a minimum salary of R1 300 a month, maternity benefits, the establishment of a commission to investigate HIV/Aids in […]
MORE than 100 suspected rapists were arrested during December in Gauteng after police stepped up action against sex offenders. Police said most of the victims were children who had been attacked by a family member or someone close to them. In the past four months, 14 rapists have been sentenced to between 10 and 25 […]
THE Gambian government has denied claims by a United Nations panel that it is involved in trafficking so-called conflict diamonds, thereby aiding rebels in Angola and Sierra Leone. The panel fingered a number of west African countries, including Gambia, for providing a conduit for diamonds being used by rebels to fund their armed actions in […]