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/ 10 October 2006
Mohammed Abdi Guhad sits idly in the shade of a makeshift wooden kiosk, explaining his plan to return to Somalia and fight for the country’s powerful Islamist movement. "I would rather kill than stay here doing nothing," he says, rubbing his hands in anticipation of leaving a dusty United Nations refugee camp in north-east Kenya where he has lived since fleeing unrest in his native land six years ago.
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/ 10 October 2006
A <i>Mail & Guardian</i> reader’s endowment policy recently matured. He was horrified to discover that after investing monthly for five years, he virtually got back what he had invested. This is not an uncommon complaint and is specifically true of policies and investments sold in the late Nineties and early 2000s when the stock markets took a bath.
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/ 10 October 2006
The United Nations said on Tuesday it would urgently move more than 40 000 Sudanese refugees deeper into Chad after weekend fighting at the border. Sudanese rebels opposed to a recent peace deal in Darfur clashed with government troops near Sudan’s border with Chad on Saturday, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said.
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/ 10 October 2006
The new biography of Nelson Mandela is not just another book on the former president, but conveys his values, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel said on Monday. ”Perhaps the strongest sense that this portrait conveys is that ubuntu is real … and that the values of ubuntu … are as noble now as they were in Qunu in the 1920s,” said Manuel.
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/ 10 October 2006
When hundreds of Fatah gunmen paraded past his West Bank supermarket last week, Mohammad Zahi stared unbelieving at their sparkling black M16 assault rifles. In years past, gunmen in similar military displays waved ageing Kalashnikovs, the cheaper and cruder Soviet-designed rifle common in the Palestinian territories and much of the Arab world.
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Political bickering and name-calling continued on Monday as the African National Congress (ANC) lashed out at a ”malicious attack and hurling of insults” by Young Communist League national secretary Buti Manamela. ”No serious-minded individual will accord respect to such insults as contained in their statement,” said ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama.
At least 13 people were killed and 46 wounded when a car bomb exploded in a busy market in north-east Baghdad on Monday, police said. The car was parked on the side of the street in Shalal market in the mainly Shi’ite Shaab district. It went off as shopkeepers were closing to break their day-long Ramadan fast.
Major world powers condemned North Korea after it said it successfully conducted a nuclear test on Monday, and called for United Nations-sponsored sanctions that could further impoverish the isolated communist state. Pyongyang’s chief ally China denounced the test as ”brazen” and urged it to avoid action that could worsen the situation.
South Africa is set to seize two more white-owned farms, one of them run by a church, to fast-track land reforms to rectify apartheid-era imbalances, a top land official said on Monday. ”The minister [of agriculture and land affairs] has signed the notices of expropriation and they have been sent,” chief land claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya told the media.