Five members of South Africa’s governing African National Congress party have arrived in Harare, the first group of foreign observers in Zimbabwe to monitor the March 31 vote, an electoral official said on Wednesday. Zimbabwe, under close scrutiny in the region to measure whether it will hold free and fair elections, has invited 45 foreign observer teams for the parliamentary polls.
The team that rescued three injured gold miners at Stilfontein on Thursday travelled about 6km underground before reaching the shaft where they surfaced. Team captain Darren Vorkel (35) said his team and the injured miners felt sheer jubilation when they saw one another.
I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. I wasn’t writing for the Mail & Guardian Online back in March 2002 but I said on radio that the proposed merger between Hewlett Packard (HP) and Compaq was (and I quote myself here) ”unlikely to succeed”. There’s a clear message here. And it’s not ”don’t try to merge laptops with printers, they do different things”.
Chechen separatists quickly appointed a successor to the killed leader Aslan Maskhadov on Wednesday, withholding his name but making it clear that it is not Russia’s most wanted man, the mastermind of hostage taking, Shamil Basayev. Their spokesperson, Akhmed Zakayev, said the name is being withheld for now, but the new leader is in his early 30s and part of a new generation of separatists.
The Israeli government is guilty of systematic fraud, ”institutional lawbreaking” and the theft of private Palestinian land to covertly establish illegal Jewish outposts in the West Bank, according an official report. ”No one seriously intended to enforce the law,” said the report.
The 15-year-old boy who accuses Michael Jackson of child molestation on Wednesday confronted the pop star across the courtroom as he took to the witness box. In emotionally charged scenes the teenager and the entertainer sat barely 15 feet apart but studiously avoided eye contact in the hushed court.
More than three years after the September 11 attacks, and -million later, the FBI has abandoned an attempt to upgrade its computer database, hampering the United States’s ability to track suspected terrorists. FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress he took full responsibility for the failure of the project, known as the virtual case file.
United States forces have agreed to hand over control of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison to the newly elected Iraqi authorities in an attempt to draw a line under one of the most shameful episodes of the Iraq war. The prison was at the centre of a political storm after revelations of mistreatment and torture of Iraqi inmates by their US guards.
Tens of thousands of Syrians jammed the centre of Damascus on Wednesday in a rally organised by the government in support of President Bashar al-Assad, who is under strong international pressure to withdraw troops from Lebanon. Demonstrators in Damascus denounced Washington’s pressure, burning United States flags as riot police took up position around the embassy.
More than half a billion people — nearly double previous estimates — were infected by the deadliest form of malaria in 2002, scientists reveal in a report out on Thursday. They calculate that one in three in the world — a total of 2,2-billion people — is at risk from the mosquito-borne parasite Plasmodium falciparum.