OWN CORRESPONDENT, Warri | Sunday 10.00pm. YOUTHS from the Ijaw community in the Niger Delta stepped up attacks on a rival group this weekend, raiding their ancestral home, kidnapping residents and seizing police weapons, witnesses said on Sunday. Ode-Itsekiri, the traditional birthplace of the Itsekiri people of the Niger Delta, was razed in a pre-dawn […]

Anthony Browne: SHARE WORLD As the financial whirlwind that started in Thailand 15 months ago engulfs the rest of the world, it is difficult not to be pessimistic. A quarter of the world is in recession, the United States and the United Kingdom may well follow, Brazil and China are struggling, while the Indonesian economy […]

Anthony Egan KING KHAMA, EMPEROR JOE AND THE GREAT WHITE QUEEN: VICTORIAN BRITAIN THROUGH AFRICAN EYES by Neil Parsons (University of Chicago Press) In 1895, three Bechuana chiefs -Khama, Sebele and Bathoen – travelled to Britain to meet Queen Victoria. This was no courtesy visit, but an attempt to protect their communities from the encroachment […]

connection’ Belinda Beresford The sound and fury of the phone war between Vodacom and MTN over whose signals are better has resulted in MTN being chastised by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). For the next six months, the errant cellphone company has to submit all its advertising for approval before it can be broadcast or […]

Black-chip companies are the belles of the business ball, but Mike Metelits warns that a bearish hangover is looming To borrow from the fashion world, the new blue is black. Blue as in blue chips, companies which are considered the aristocrats of the financial markets because of their good returns and reliability. Black as in […]

eM&G reporter Aggressive turf wars are being fought in cyberspace as companies attempt to grab more of the electronic marketplace. A new twist is Vodacom’s move to become an Internet service provider (ISP). The communications company will be offering three Internet access packages, including a prepaid option. Vodacom aims to be the largest ISP by […]

Evidence wa ka Ngobeni Tzaneen farm workers Jonas Maluleke (26) and Daniel Sono (28) have been waiting behind bars for a year to get their day in court in the Northern Province. Since they first appeared in court in October 1997, their trial on charges of rape and assault of a 25-year-old woman has been […]

Mark Rozzo THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE by Simon Winchester (Viking) In 1879, James Murray, an expert on the dialects of his native Scotland and the recently appointed editor of The New Dictionary on Historical Principles, called for volunteers from Britain, the United States and the colonies to help create the first complete dictionary of the […]

… Can the Internet be chartered like the London Underground? Leander Kahney investigates mapping cyberspace A three-dimensional map of the Internet, showing the geographical location of machines on the network and the ways in which they relate to each other, is promised by the Silicon Valley firm Invisible Worlds next year. The announcement has been […]

David Shapshak in Tokyo So you live in an African country and you want to buy a good reconditioned second- hand car. With not much to find in the local yellow pages, nor much variety in the pricey domestic market, what do you do? Simple, you buy and import a foreign car. The success of […]