RAMPAGING herds of hippopotami have been spreading terror among farmers and fishermen along the river Niger, local authorities in the west African country of the same name said this week. The giant mammals, which can weigh up to four tonnes, have been attacking boatmen and impeding rice harvesting. Two hippos who were found to have […]

A DEPARTMENT of Correctional Services officer in New Hanover in KwaZulu-Natal, 24-year-old Ntutchuko Ngubane, has been discovered hanging from a tree in the veld near the town by farm labourers. Ngubane, who had been stationed at New Hanover prison for the past two years, “had behaved strangely” during his last shift, said a Prisons official: […]

EVARISTO CUMBANE, Maputo | Tuesday SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki has engineered a breakthrough in the conflict known as “Africa’s World War” by persuading five African leaders with armies embroiled in the Democratic Republic of Congo war to agree to pull their troops back. Mbeki, who mediated the one-day summit in Maputo, said the nations […]

POLICE are holding a cuckolded fifty-year-old Swazi who apparently hacked his wife and her lover to death with an axe over the weekend. The man, of Ka-Langa, a rural village in the rural Lubombo region, killed the couple after catching them having sex in his rival’s house on Saturday night. Finding the adulterous couple having […]

AFP and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday AIDS-related deaths in South Africa’s prisons increased by about 300% from 1995 to 1999, and are expected to continue to soar, an official with a prisons monitoring group said this week. Natural deaths in prisons had increased from 186 in 1995 to 737 in 1999, with about 90% […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Bloemfontein | Tuesday THE world is failing to feed those who need it most, with some 80 million children dying worldwide every year through malnutrition, says the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). And while the potential exists to produce enough food for everyone in the world, about 20% of people in […]

Gavin Pattison, Gulu, Uganda | Tuesday HEALTH officials in northern Uganda say they will use force if necessary to impose a quarantine on three districts at the centre of an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus – an incurable viral disease which liquefies victims’ internal organs and leads to death by bleeding in up to […]

THE water requirements of a rare, inch-long toad native to Tanzania’s southern highlands have prevented a hydro-electric plant in the area operating at full capacity, a local newspaper reported. The habitat of the Kihansi Spray Toad needs as much water, about seven cubic metres per second, as is used to generate 52 megawatts of electricity. […]

ALGERIA’S state-run conglomerate Sonatrach expects oil and gas export revenues for this year to reach $20bn, its chairman Abdelhak Bouhafs said this week. Sonatrach’s revenues at the end of the first half of this year stood at $10.2bn, based on a Sahara Blend crude price of $27 a barrel, he added. The figure is well […]

DARREN SCHUETTLER, Johannesburg | Tuesday HARMONY Gold, South Africa’s third biggest gold producer, is considering closing a money-losing shaft after reporting weaker results for the quarter to September. Harmony kicked off South Africa’s gold reporting season with a 30% drop in net earnings, prompting investors to lop nearly nine percent off the company’s share price. […]