More than 20-million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk of famine, in conditions the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) described recently as the worst in his experience. James Morris, executive director of the WFP, has warned the international community that millions of people in Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Tanzania are now at risk because of drought.
Jacob Zuma is on trial for one of the most heinous crimes imaginable in our criminal code. Observing the histrionics in the environs of the Johannesburg High Court, one wouldn’t have thought so. Zuma the accused sweeps into court in expensive state-issue motor vehicles accompanied by besuited armed security — provided by the state.
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An unemployed teacher took 18 students, a teacher and another man hostage at gunpoint at a high school in western France on Thursday, officials said. At the time of going to press the drama was unfolding in a state high school in the town of Sable-sur-Sarthe, southwest of Le Mans.
Although South Africa was the biggest importer of poultry in Africa, it was also the country best prepared against avian flu, a Southern African Development Community (SADC) workshop on the epidemic heard in Pretoria on Thursday. ”South Africa is in a very good place. You are used to fighting bird flu.”
Villagers on the Zanzibar archipelago appealed for food aid on Thursday, after being hit by a drought that has hurt farmers across East Africa. The drought has also led to hunger in mainland Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti. ”We are facing a serious shortage of food in our village.”
The United States Department of State has listed Zimbabwe among the worst dictatorships in the world that trample on human rights and whose rulers are accountable to no one. It grouped Zimbabwe among some of the world’s most notorious dictatorships, such as the reclusive communist state of North Korea.
Lawyers for a group of men arrested after the discovery of an arms cache in Zimbabwe’s eastern city of Mutare were on Thursday still waiting for access to their clients, one of the lawyers said. ”We’re still waiting to get access to the accused,” said Tafadzwa Mugabe. He said it was not clear how many had been arrested.
Denmark’s national symbol, the Little Mermaid sculpture perched on a rock overlooking the Copenhagen port, was splattered with green paint by vandals and adorned with a dildo, police said on Thursday. Investigators have ”no leads on the perpetrators of the act … which took place early Wednesday”, police said.