POLICE forced their way into a South African experimental facility to allow animal rights groups to rescue 14 baboons destined for use in nuclear weapons testing by the French military. Policemen used a bolt cutter to force the locks of the French-run Centre Africaine Primatologie Experimentale (CAPE) near Hazyview in eastern Mpumalanga, after an animal […]
NIGERIA’S state-run telecommunications company NITEL will be sold off by the end of 2001, says President Olusegun Obasanjo’s chief economic adviser Phillip Asiodu. Asiodu said privatisation was ”still going ahead” and ”would be completed by the end of 2001.” The break-up and privatisation of the state-run electricity company NEPA would take longer but the government […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Sunday PROVINCIAL and Local Affairs Minister Sydney Mufamadi has postponed the announcement of the date of South Africa’s local government elections for the second time in a week after an impassioned plea by traditional leaders. Mufamadi admits the government does not see the need to postpone the elections – “as this […]
A COMMISSION to investigate human rights abuses in Nigeria dating back to the country’s civil war will start public hearings on October 23. The panel has spent a year sifting through thousands of petitions detailing alleged human rights abuses. Among the cases put to the commission are the extrajudicial killings of prominent opposition leaders under […]
GRACA Machel, former first lady of both Mozambique and South Africa, has urged more than 400 women business, political and academic leaders from 40 countries attending a global summit in Johannesburg not to forget to humanise their “struggle for empowerment.” Machel told the delegates: “You compete, but you compete always with a social agenda. That’s […]
OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Saturday THE rape of girls under the age of 15 has doubled in the past 10 years – and one-third of the rapists are school teachers, according to the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) latest survey on the extent of sexual violence against girls in South Africa. The Education Ministry’s Bheki […]
AT least 21 people were killed and more than 50 injured in clashes between gemstone miners and traders at a mine in northern Tanzania. Quoting police, the independent Guardian newspaper said the clashes broke out at Mererani mine near Arusha when some traders seized gemstones from a miner, who was reportedly beaten up and slashed […]
FOUR Palestinians were shot dead on Friday in fighting with Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, bringing the death toll in nine days of violence to at least 73. Two Palestinians were killed in an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen near the West Bank city of Nablus, medical […]
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proposed a special war crimes court in Sierra Leone to try adults and 15 to 18 year-old youths accused of maiming and killing during the country’s civil war. Because of a controversy among UN agencies and officials on trying children, who would not be sent to jail, Annan said the […]
A HUGE crowd of opposition supporters, rallying in Belgrade this week to force President Slobodan Milosevic to step down, has stormed the federal parliament building and set it on fire. The crowd, numbering hundreds of thousands, also took over a police station and set fire to the headquarters of Serbian state television, loyal to Milosevic. […]