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/ 11 October 2007
South Africa’s gold companies, already mining at the world’s deepest depths, are looking to plumb even deeper veins in a new gold rush spurred by record prices.
The deeper miners go, the richer the ore being uncovered. The price in dangers, though, includes rockfalls, poisonous gas explosions, flooding and earthquakes.
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/ 8 February 2007
Chinese President Hu Jintao is in Africa bearing the usual gifts of money for soccer stadiums and interest-free loans, but is also acknowledging tensions. Unmentioned, as Beijing adds lustre to Africa’s renewed status as a strategic ally, is the possibility of a clash with the United States as the two vie for resources and influence on the continent.
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/ 2 December 2006
The chief’s story is dark and familiar. Attackers on horseback shattering his dawn ritual of tea brewing — shouting racial venom, killing men, raping women. The survivors fleeing to a makeshift camp, sheltering from the desert sun under lengths of cloth strung from thorn trees.
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/ 7 September 2006
A particularly drug-resistant tuberculosis discovered in eastern South Africa is likely to have spread beyond the rural area where 52 of the 53 people first diagnosed with the new strain have died, the doctor who discovered the super bug said.
Election banners festoon the rutted main road that divides the village, but no candidates have come to press for votes from these cassava farmers whose lives seem locked in another century. Three stopped clocks adorn a wall of the chief’s home. They’re only 100km south of Kinshasa, the capital, but have no electricity.
The international community is determined to move former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s war crimes trial to The Netherlands, and will even ensure that his defence witnesses will be able to appear there, a United Nations official said. At his first court appearance on Monday before the UN-backed war crimes court, Taylor had asked through his lawyer that his case remain in Sierra Leone.
The trial of the toppled Liberian president accused of backing a bloody rebellion in his neighbour to the north could take months, according to the chief prosecutor at the special United Nations-backed tribunal that will try Charles Taylor. Prosecutor Desmond de Silva also said security concerns had prompted officials a day before to request that the trial be moved to Europe.
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/ 23 January 2006
African leaders began their annual summit on Monday in disarray, failing to resolve dissension over Sudan’s bid to chair the 53-state body while it is involved in the conflict in western Darfur. The traditional handover to the incoming chairperson was delayed until after a scheduled Monday-afternoon private meeting of leaders.
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/ 18 September 2005
The African leader some call a hero and others a destructive despot suggests people in his country aren’t hungry, they just can’t eat their favourite food. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe said in an exclusive interview on Friday that his people are ”very, very happy”, though aid agencies report four million of 11,6-million face famine.