You could take a modern sports car and add or subtract 100kg of ballast without the average driver feeling the difference, even when driving it to the limit around a racetrack. Motorcycles, especially superbikes, are a totally different kettle of fish. They’re now so technologically advanced that designers of new models battle to trim any weight at all.
Cash-strapped Zimbabwe is running out of Aids drugs, with less than a month’s supply of anti-retrovirals left for 20Â 000 patients on a government treatment programme. "We understand that drugs are competing with other items, like fuel, for foreign currency, but the picture is not encouraging," said National Pharmaceutical Company boss Charles Mwaramba.
Recent moves by the Zimbabwean government to allow white farmers whose land was confiscated to resume farming have drawn a variety of responses. "They killed people; they threw them out of their farms, they destroyed the economy. Now they want us to rescue them," says Gerry Whitehead, whose land was seized in 2002.
HIV/Aids organisations in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, have warned people to be on the lookout for individuals selling fake anti-retrovirals (ARVs). Doctors have been shown ARV capsules filled with maize meal, bought by unsuspecting members of the public at prices far lower than the market rate.
Mea culpa time, I guess. A reader writes in from Pretoria (of all benighted places) to advise me to check my facts before putting my big mouth into gear and letting rip. Mary Moffat Livingstone did not pine herself to a gin-soaked death in Kuruman, the reader says, but joined her husband on his safaris into the African hinterland and died of fever on the banks of the Zambezi.
With less than 21 months to go before the expiry of his disputed presidential tenure, President Robert Mugabe last month got his beleaguered Zanu-PF government to launch yet another economic recovery plan called ”National Economic Development Priority Programme” in a bid to revive Zimbabwe’s collapsed economy.
Evo Morales went for a characteristically theatrical gesture on May Day when he sent in troops to seize Bolivia’s natural gas fields, pipelines and refineries. As global energy companies struggle to digest the consequences, it is clear that the president of Latin America’s highest, poorest and most isolated country intends to keep on trying to redistribute the region’s wealth.
Spillover from the Darfur conflict is in danger of destabilising the entire Central African region, say observers. Since the war in Sudan erupted, rebel groups have formed in neighbouring Chad and are beginning to emerge in the Central African Republic, which shares a border with both states.
Small-scale black farmers in the southern Cape are locked in battles over access to municipal commonage as councils fetch top prices for land amid the local golf and luxury-estate development boom. ”The municipality has no land for us, the poor of the poorest, but the municipality has land for the rich,” says Lucas Lebenya, secretary of the Siyazama Emergent Farmers.
The United Nations Security Council met behind closed doors this week to discuss a draft resolution on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme as Tehran announced it had successfully enriched uranium to a new level.