A British oil worker and his two-and-a-half-year old son were kidnapped Sunday in Nigeria, a few days after a another British oil worker was taken hostage. Martin Westbury, and his son, were seized by three armed youths in Warri in south-east Nigeria, an official working for Westbury’s employer, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell. The official […]

THE South African national netball team leaves this week for a two-week tour of Jamaica and Britain. The Amablomme-blomme will play four international games in their first tour since the Commonwealth Games last year.

A MAN who covered his face with a farmer’s wife’s panties while robbing the family at gunpoint was sentenced to 10 years in jail in the Nelspruit regional court on Friday. Nkosinathi Sibiya (19) and an accomplice, who was shot dead during his arrest, broke into a farmhouse in Malelane last April while the family […]

BROTHERS Alex (37) and Elijah Ngirazi (23) on Friday admitted in a Zimbabwean court to murdering William Player, a great grandson of the man who founded the John Player tobacco dynasty. His body was found on Thursday, three weeks after he disappeared from his home outside the capital.”We have not positively identified him, but there […]

A RWANDAN court on Thursday condemned two people to death and sentenced five others to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity committed during the country’s 1994 genocide, according to legal sources.The court, specialising in crimes committed between April and July 1994, in genocide which left between 500000 and 800000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates dead, handed […]

SOUTH Africa’s top 64 under-19 rugby players will vie this week for places in the 26-man squad to play in the IRB/Fira Junior World Championship in Wales between March 26 and April 4. The final squad will be announced on February 22. After warm-up games in March, the team will face first-round opponents Uruguay on […]

steel Ben Turok In 1958 when Marius Schoon applied for membership of the Congress of Democrats (COD), the Congress Alliance (as the African National Congress-led movement was then known) was actively fighting to defend its policy of non-racialism against those who wanted to establish the Pan Africanist Congress as a basically anti-white organisation. The ANC […]

Howard Barrell: OVER A BARREL Who would want to be President Nelson Mandela? Not me. And my reasons have nothing to do with spending nearly 30 years in prison. What would convince me I could do without international adulation and the Nobel Peace Prize would be the exasperation of having to placate, encourage and cajole […]

TWO Sierra Leonean government ministers thought to have been killed in the rebel invasion of Freetown may actually have been kidnapped by the rebels, authorities said on Friday.”Rumours persist that they are still alive and in the hands of the rebels,” a statement from the president’s office said of Public Affairs Minister, Mohamed Sesay, and […]

found Benoni Charles Leonard `This is it! This is the site!” South Africans Roddy Quinn and Dan Chirboli looked at each other. “He must be mad,” Chirboli said to Quinn over the noise of the helicopter. “It’s just mine dumps … and it’s Benoni!” But Womad’s United Kingdom-based artistic director Thomas Brooman was convinced. Two […]