Balancing on the edge of the wooden catamaran, Anura Aparekkag stares long and hard at the blue waters lapping at the sides of his boat. ”No fish today. No fish yesterday. They are too scared to come back here,” he says. In the two hours since leaving the sands of Koggala, the 5m vessel has plied the waters along the coast in a futile search for fish that once could be scooped out of this ocean by hand.

Spoornet CEO, Dolly Mokgatle’s resignation was the climax of a war with Maria Ramos over the rail giant’s management and strategic direction. Mokgatle was swept out of the second hardest executive job in the country this week, because she couldn’t hold her own against the woman who has the hardest — her boss, Maria Ramos.

The insurance industry refers to ”acts of God”. Does last month’s tsunami qualify? How does the worst natural disaster for half a century square with the ideas of a divine plan and divine providence? How could a merciful and just God allow the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean to shift so catastrophically? The Mail & Guardian asked local religious leaders for their views.

Mahmoud Abbas, the newly elected Palestinian president, faced his first big test on Thursday night when Palestinian militants detonated a bomb on the edge of the Gaza Strip, killing at least five Israelis. The explosives were packed into a truck which the militants drove into the Karni crossing into Gaza at around 11pm.

The United States’s human rights abuses have provided a rallying cry for terrorists and set a bad example to regimes seeking to justify their own poor rights records, a leading independent watchdog said on Thursday. The torture of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay have undermined the credibility of the US as a defender of human rights and opponent of terrorism, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says in its annual report.

Tamil rebels have been recruiting children from tsunami relief camps, the head of Unicef in Sri Lanka said on Thursday. Although the government and the separatists have been working together in relative peace during the relief efforts, Ted Chaiban, of the United Nations children’s fund, said there were three "verified cases of child recruitment" involving the Tamil Tigers.

The painstaking process of matching corpses to the names of more than 3 000 people still missing since the tsunami struck Thailand has been disrupted by a turf war between the police and the government’s forensic team.