Two years ago George Bush told the world about things he’d heard on ”the internets”. Since then the United States president has progressed, becoming more familiar with the hi-tech world he leads. This week, Bush expressed his enthusiasm for ”the Google”.

Few of Goma’s long-suffering residents imagined that life could get much worse after the fall of Zaire’s kleptomaniac president, Mobutu Sese Seko, who amassed billions while driving his people ever deeper into poverty and despair before he was toppled nearly a decade ago.

Cut trade barriers, unclog the labour market and boost competition: the national treasury wants more aggressive liberalisation of the economy to boost growth, rather than protective tariffs, quotas and industrial incentives. This approach has put team finance at loggerheads with other government departments.

EThekwini municipal manager Mike Sutcliffe is sitting on a damning Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD) report detailing "lax control" of hundreds of firearms and ammunition issued by the state to the Durban Metro Police Service. The report lists 66 state-issued firearms as missing and being investigated by the police.

Last week saw the 20th anniversary of the air accident in which Mozambican president Samora Machel lost his life along with some 25 other passengers on a Soviet-built and crewed Tupolev TU-134 aircraft. Few will deny that Machel’s death was a grave loss to his country and, in a wider sense, to African politics. What cannot be denied are the extraordinary and often quite bizarre circumstances surrounding investigations into the crash.

ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma, desperate to maintain a clean image in the ANC’s bitter leadership race, has unleashed his ideological bulldogs on Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon. Zuma tends to sit on his hands when mud is flung at him because he wants to be seen as a unifying figure.