Surging demand for African coffee is a unique opportunity for producers, but they must not let quality slip or assume processing is the best way to capitalise on it, a coffee official said on Thursday. East African Fine Coffees Association director Philip Gitao told Reuters Africa’s market has come of age.
An innovative concept and the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin were key factors in the surprise decision to award the 2014 Winter Games to Russia’s Sochi. Sochi, on the shores of the Black Sea with a palm tree-lined coast, built a bid around the city’s mild climate and the nearby Krasnaya Polyana snow-capped mountain range.
Hours after being sworn in as a member of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature, Amos ”Toenka” Matila found himself behind bars, charged with drunken driving. Matila, who is acting chairperson of the South African National Civic Organisation’s Gauteng branch, apparently drove into the back of a truck on Tuesday night.
The side of a sodden mountain collapsed on a bus carrying up to 60 passengers along a remote Mexican road on Wednesday and hours later rescuers could only pull a woman’s corpse from the debris. Local rescuers said those on board were probably killed but the government held out hope for survivors.
Pakistani security forces fired a series of ”warning blasts” before dawn on Thursday near Islamabad’s radical Red Mosque, stepping up pressure on hundreds of militant students inside to surrender, a security official said. There were about eight explosions at intervals of several minutes, witnesses said.
A Zimbabwe Foreign Ministry official gatecrashed the United States embassy’s July 4 celebrations on Wednesday to criticise outgoing ambassador Christopher Dell, saying ”diplomats are supposed to be bridge builders not bridge busters”. Samuel Mhango criticised Dell for remarks he made in an address on Wednesday on the assault by police of opposition leaders in Harare.
An explosion in a nightclub in north-east China killed 25 people and injured 33, state media reported on Thursday as investigators sought to pin down the cause. The blast hit an entertainment club in Benxi county, Liaoning province, at about 9pm (1pm GMT) on Wednesday, the China News Service reported.
The last hour of captivity for Alan Johnston was perhaps the worst. His guard burst into his room in the early hours of Wednesday morning and told him to get dressed. His regular captor, "an extraordinarily moody man with dark rages", had been joined by some new gunmen who looked "totally wired".
Lesotho has an estimated HIV/Aids prevalence of 30%, the third highest in the world, as well as alarming rates of tuberculosis. Without fully fledged and all-encompassing aid, the entire Basotho nation is set to be extinct within 30 years. Thijs van der Post travels to Lesotho’s mountains to meet those who are trying to make a difference.
Just as the London bombs in the summer of 2005 were Blair’s bombs, the inevitable consequence of his government’s lawless attack on Iraq, so the potential bombs in the summer of 2007 are Brown’s bombs. Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor as prime minister, has been an unerring supporter of the unprovoked bloodbath whose victims now equal those of the Rwandan genocide.