South Africa is giving ballot boxes, ballot booths, indelible ink, and many other voting materials to Burundi to assist them in holding a free and fair referendum next week, the Foreign Affairs Department said on Monday. This was at the request of Burundi’s Independent Electoral Commission, said departmental spokesperson Lakela Kaunda.

A Kenyan-born British national has lived at Nairobi airport for six months after being refused entry to Britain and Kenya, marooning him in a bureaucratic twilight zone. Sanjai Shah (42), has a small mattress, sheets, a blanket and daily rations of food from immigration officials to sustain him as he wanders the lounges of Jomo Kenyatta airport.

A judge in Genoa on Monday ordered a full trial for 28 officers allegedly involved in a brutal mass beating of demonstrators during the G8 summit three years ago. Almost 100 people, including five Britons, were injured after police, carabinieri and revenue guards stormed a school in Genoa that was the makeshift headquarters of an umbrella protest group.

They spent years working their way into the boardrooms of some of the country’s top institutions. Now, a group of top professional black women is poised to take over in an arena you’d least expect: the kitchen. Durban-based black economic empowerment group Ayavuna Women’s Investments is the proud new owner of household appliance manufacturer, Defy.

An 80-year-old lawyer and fishing enthusiast who clung to a buoy in the chill Atlantic waters for 20 hours until his rescue fought off despair by focusing on the finer points of the law. ”You have to defeat the thought of a milliard [billion] deaths,” Ignacio Siberio said on Monday, as he recovered at home after his ordeal.

Sharif Omar has been waiting two years for the bulldozers, ever since Israel’s steel and barbed wire ”security fence” carved its way between his village and its land. Last week the excavators and diggers finally arrived on the outskirts of Jayyous to lay the foundations for an expansion of the nearby Jewish settlement of Zufim, fulfilling the fears and warnings of its Palestinian neighbours.

Spain’s former prime minister José María Aznar wiped all computer records at his office referring to the March 11 Madrid train bombings and the rest of his period of government, his successor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, said on Monday. ”There was nothing, absolutely nothing … everything had been wiped,” Zapatero told a raucous session of the parliamentary commission.

Save the Children suspended its operations in south Darfur on Monday after two of its aid workers were killed during a roadside ambush. Abhakar el Tayeb, a medical assistant, and Yacoub Abdelnabi Ahmed, a mechanic, were shot while travelling in a convoy of three vehicles. The two, who were recruited in Sudan, were part of a mobile health clinic.

Twelve pre-schoolers from Roodepoort in Gauteng have silenced sceptics by learning to read in just four weeks. The children, aged five and six, are in Grade R at King’s School and were selected to participate in a four-week programme developed by a company specialising in literacy programmes.