Staff Reporter
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/ 4 June 1998

Machel hearing begins

THURSDAY 6.00PM: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has begun a closed hearing into the 1986 air crash in which Mozambiqan president Samora Machel was killed. TRC spokesman Vuyani Green said that there was evidence linking the crash to activities of the former Suth African Defence Force. Several witnesses, including members of former South African military […]

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/ 3 June 1998

Unita ‘preparing for war’

WEDNESDAY 12.00NOON: THE former commander of the United Nations observer force in Angola says there is evidence in the country of a military build-up that “indicates preparations for a possible return to war”. Zimbabwean army Major-General Phillip Sibanda, who has just returned to Harare from a two-and-a-half-year command of the formerly 7000-strong UN military monitoring […]

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/ 3 June 1998

Ethiopia invades Eritrea

WEDNESDAY, 6.00PM: ETHIOPIAN troops, tanks and heavy artillery crossed the border into Eritrea at dawn on Wednesday morning, the Eritrean foreign ministry said on Wednesday. The invasion, which has not been confirmed by independent sources, is an escalation of a tense border stand-off that has seen at least 100 people killed or wounded since Sunday. […]

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/ 3 June 1998

Prime Evil fingers PW

WEDNESDAY, 2.15PM: APARTHEID’s chief assassin Eugene de Kock, known by his colleagues as “Prime Evil”, claimed on Wednesday that former president PW Botha ordered the 1987 bomb attack on Cosatu House, headquarters of the country’s largest trade union federation. Testifying at Botha’s trial for ignoring a Truth and Reconciliation Commission subpoena, De Kock told the […]

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/ 2 June 1998

Unita still has an army

TUESDAY 11.00AM: THERE are still a large number of troops belonging to the Angolan rebel movement Unita in several provinces, in spite of its claims to have demilitarised its forces, according to a United Nations official. Quoting a report by the commander of UN forces overseeing the peace process, UN representative for Angola Alouine Blondin […]

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/ 1 June 1998

Kenneth Kaunda freed

MONDAY, 4.00PM: IN an unexpected turn in the Lusaka High Court on Monday, the state dropped all charges against former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, after which Judge Japhta Banda declared Kaunda a free man. “It’s great, it’s great,” declared Zambia’s 74-year-old founding father as hundreds of his supporters broke through a police cordon to celebrate […]

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/ 1 June 1998

Banana denies sex charges

MONDAY 6.00PM: FORMER Zimbabwean president Canaan Banana has denied allegations by three policemen, two air force officers, two secret service agents, a cook, a jobseeker and a hitchhiker that he either forced or attempted to force them to have sex with him. Banana, 62, a former Methodist minister, was appearing in the Harare High Court […]

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/ 29 May 1998

Mac’s back after Rhapsody blues

Will Tyler Of all Apple Computer’s troubles in recent years, the problem that has proved most difficult to solve is how to replace its ageing flagship, the Macintosh operating system (OS). Two previous attempts have failed. Earlier this month, at the Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and interim CEO, revealed […]

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/ 29 May 1998

Space mission with a fridge in mind

Tim Radford United States space scientists believe they will be able to conjure up refrigerator and furnace insulation tiles out of thin air. They are experimenting with a composite material called aerogel, the lightest solid known. A lump of this “frozen smoke” the size of a man would weigh less than 0,45kg, but could bear […]

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/ 29 May 1998

Students demand beer

Mukoni T Ratshitanga Two University of Venda buildings were burnt down this week, causing more than R500 000 worth of damage. The student affairs block was torched during the early hours of Monday morning, while the office of the South African Students’ Congress (Sasco) was destroyed the next day. A group of Azanian Students’ Congress […]