Somalia’s Islamists said on Tuesday they would not attend peace talks with the interim government until Ethiopian troops left their soil, and for the first time acknowledged Eritrean backing for their cause. ”As long as Ethiopia is in our country, talks with the government cannot go ahead,” the Islamists’ main leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, said.
President Robert Mugabe opened a new legislative year on Tuesday with a low key speech to Parliament, blaming economic problems on Britain and other Western critics of his human rights record. Zimbabwe is in a state of economic collapse, suffering from the world’s highest inflation rate — more than 1 000% — and shortages of all basic goods.
The world record for the biggest ensemble of spoon players has been set in Britain, the organiser of the event announced on Tuesday. Amateur street-theatre group Stripey-Jumper rounded up 345 people to bash out a version of pub favourite <i>Knees Up Mother Brown</i> before an eagle-eyed panel of adjudicators.
A member of South Africa’s observer mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo has been sent home, the leader of the mission and Deputy Minister of Defence Mluleki George said on Tuesday. George said the man, who belongs to the South African NGO Coalition, had breached the mission’s code of conduct.
Heritage month — which is September — will see the holding of hearings into the causes of deaths at initiation schools. The Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural and Linguistic Communities said on Tuesday that this was decided as a matter of urgency at a meeting held to discuss the recent spate of deaths at initiation schools.
South African telecommunications company Telkom said on Tuesday that it will comply fully with the legal requirement prescribing mandatory 10-digit dialling and the replacement of 09 with 00 as the international dialling prefix. This is in line with the minister of communication’s promulgation of a numbering plan prescribed by the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa.
Libya was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb before it decided in 2003 to abandon its programme to produce weapons of mass destruction, leader Moammar Gadaffi said, according to the country’s official news agency. ”Libya was on the point of building a nuclear bomb: that is no longer a secret,” Gadaffi was quoted on Monday as saying.
Somalia’s interim government agreed on Tuesday to attend new peace talks with the country’s powerful Islamists, responding to a United Nations drive to avoid war in the Horn of Africa country. ”We will go to Khartoum without any preconditions,” said Abdirizak Adam, interim President Abdullahi Yusuf’s chief of staff.
Opposition protesters in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) rampaged down a main highway into Kinshasa on Tuesday, tearing down election posters and demanding the postponement of historic polls scheduled for Sunday. The several hundred demonstrators clashed with riot police who beat them with batons.
The so-called ”Waterkloof Four” will know their fate in November after their sentencing was postponed again in the Pretoria Regional Court on Tuesday. The four — Christoff Becker, Frikkie du Preez, Gert van Schalkwyk and Reinach Tied — were found guilty last year of the apparently racist murder of an unidentified man and the assault of another in 2001.