North Korean men hoping to emulate their ”dear leader” Kim Jong-il by sporting a bouffant have been instructed to do their bit for socialism by cutting it off. North Korean state television is showing a series of programmes instructing shabbily coiffured men on the personal grooming required of a citizen of the vehemently anti-capitalist state.

South Africa emerged as Africa’s main troubleshooter in 2004. Whether in the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire or even Sudan, South African president Thabo Mbeki’s intervention — though not always successful — was sought by the African Union (AU).

The upgrade of South Africa’s country ceilings for foreign currency debt and bank deposits to Baa1 from Baa2 by international agency Moody’s Investors Service was a resounding acknowledgment that South Africa has got its policy mix right, says Colen Garrow, an economist at Brait.

One of the strongmen of Palestinian politics, Jibril Rajoub, resigned from the government on Tuesday night as the newly elected President, Mahmoud Abbas, prepared to embark on a long-awaited shake-up of the security services. Abbas has consistently opposed the use of violence in the four-year-old Palestinian uprising.

Nearly a third of the -million urgently requested by the United Nations for the Asian tsunami relief effort has now been received, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator said on Tuesday. Jan Egeland told the leading aid donors in Geneva that he had urged the speedy release of their government’s unprecedented -billion pledges.

Standing amid the ruins, Suwandi reflected on what had happened to his old workplace — a giant cement factory next to the sea. "I’m very sad. I don’t have a job any more. We lost all our money in here," he explained, pointing at his office, now a mangled heap of metal and oversized tubing.

Plastic bottles could provide the cheapest and most practical way of preventing water-borne diseases in regions affected by the recent tsunami, say Swiss scientists. Solar water disinfection, or Sodis, relies on radiation and heat from the sun to kill most bacteria and viruses in the water

There’s a lot of disinformation that is deliberately being spread around at the moment. Every whisper suggesting that the Asian tsunami was not natural, or was due to something other than an earthquake, is being systematically debunked quite thoroughly in the mass media. Ian Fraser offers up everything you need to know about the Asian tsunami — because if it’s online, it must be true.

A comprehensive peace deal between the government of Sudan and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army on January 9 capped a year of slow but steady progress in efforts to end the 21-year-old civil war in southern Sudan.