AFP AND OWN CORRESPONDENT, Baghdad | Monday IRAQI President Saddam Hussein has taken delivery of a copy of the Koran he ordered written in his own blood to thank God for escaping unscathed from his long political career. The special edition of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, took three years to finish and was […]

RESCUE workers are continuing to work around the clock in a bid to free two miners who have been trapped underground since Friday following a rockfall at the Kloof Gold mine outside Carltonville on the West Rand. A mine official said proto teams had not managed to make contact with the men and that the […]

SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki has joined leaders from ten other nations in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), in the Togo capital, Lome to discuss the growing political tension in the Ivory Coast. Trouble in Ivory Coast began when its ruler, General Robert Guei, decided to run for office, after telling the nation in […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT AND AFP, Cape Town | Saturday A SOUTH African court has for the first time awarded a person symbolic compensation for the distress suffered after being forced from their home by the former apartheid regime. The Land Claims Court this week ordered that 75-year-old Ronald Hermanus, a coloured man, be paid R6 000 […]

ROSE-MARIE BRUBALLA AND OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Monday SOUTH AFRICA’S elite Scorpions crime-fighting unit has joined the hunt for a ship that may have brought a potentially disastrous livestock disease into the country, a government official said. The move comes as government officials fight to contain the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that could cost South […]

GRAVE robbers have dug up the bones of a former deputy minister of the apartheid regime to create a powerful “cure” for Aids, the Sunday Times newspaper reported. “All that is left of Hannes Rall, a deputy minister of transport in the apartheid government, are a few bones in a plastic bag at a police […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Maputo | Monday NEARLY 100_ 000 Mozambican families in areas affected by the devastating floods earlier this year will get a new lease of life when the country’s agricultural authorities start handing out seed kits for the coming planting season. Already dozens of trucks loaded with seeds imported from neighbouring South Africa and […]

A COUPLE have been publicly flogged in Nigeria’s northwestern Zamfara state for failing to prove their allegations that the Islamic head of the village had sex with their daughter, a court official said. Haruna Dutsi and his wife, Aishat, were given 80 strokes of the cane each in a public spectacle in the village of […]

DAVID MAGERIA, Nairobi | Saturday NINE out of the 20 members of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa(COMESA) have promised to join a regional free trade area when it is launched at the end of next month, say officials. COMESA’s Secretary General Erastus Mwencha said the FTA programme was ”firmly on course” and […]

JEREMY LOVELL AND OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Friday SOUTH Africa will not be stampeded into selling off its state-owned firms, which together account for 14% of gross domestic product, and will try to get the best prices for telecommunications utility Telkom, power utility Eskom, transport utility Transnet and arms maker Denel while trying to […]