An alliance of United Kingdom MPs, human rights groups and survivors of the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan on Thursday launched a campaign for bolder international intervention to stop the bloodshed. The alliance is calling for the United Nations to authorise peace-enforcement operations to be led by African Union troops.
The board of the World Bank on Thursday approved the controversial nomination of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon, as its new president.
Wolfowitz was assured of board approval after he won over European diplomats during a five-hour charm offensive in Brussels on Wednesday.
United States spy agencies were ”dead wrong” in ”almost all” of their pre-war judgements about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability, a commission said on Thursday. The report reveals that US intelligence still knows ”disturbingly little” about the weapons programmes in other potentially dangerous nations.
<b>NOT THE MOVIE OF THE WEEK:</b> Director Wes Anderson’s main theme and form in <i>The Life Acquatic</i> are the same as those of his previous film, <i>The Royal Tenenbaums</i>, writes Shaun de Waal.
"In Africa I think art is still very close to life. And issues [that] African artists are dealing with are issues of life". Brenton Maart asks top curator Simon Njami what makes African art African.
A new book collects the writing of South Africa’s literary lion, Es’kia Mphahlele. In this edited extract from one essay, he describes how reading books enriched him as a writer.
The 2005 <i>BusinessMap</i>/<i>Business Report</i> Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Awards were announced in Sandton on Thursday night, with the prestigious BEE deal of the year going to Grasslands Development Trust’s purchase of 100% of Grasslands Agriculture. The awards celebrate the top achievers in BEE.
Pope John Paul II has suffered septic shock and a heart attack, and his condition is "very serious", Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls said on Friday. "Following a urinary-tract infection, septic shock and a cardiocirculatory collapse occurred," Navarro-Valls said in a statement. The pope received the last rites on Thursday evening after suffering the heart attack.
"In an internationally condemned move, an enraged King Mswati III of Swaziland has decided to close his country’s borders with South Africa, starting on Friday." Sounds unbelievable? It is! Read the <i>Mail & Guardian Online</i>’s April Fool’s Day story that had its readers wondering about the Swazi monarch’s shock announcement.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has set up a quarantine zone along the frontier with Angola in response to fears that a recent outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus could spread across the 1 750km border. Congolese Health Minister Emile Bongeli said: "Though there are no signs of any cases in the DRC, we live with the threat of another outbreak, so we are taking precautions."