Guinea-Bissau has been hit by an unseasonal invasion of desert locusts that threatens to damage the small West African country’s cashew-nut trees that are currently in flower. Exports of cashew nuts are the main source of foreign exchange for this former Portuguese colony.
An Israeli settler arrested at London’s Heathrow airport with a loaded handgun in his luggage was acquitted on Thursday of possessing a dangerous article. A jury at Isleworth Crown Court in west London accepted Benjamin Lehman’s claim that he had forgotten the gun was in his backpack.
West Africa’s central bank enrolled town criers, United Nations peacekeepers and even desert pilots as it pulled out all the stops for an unprecedented, 10-week campaign to swap old banknotes for new that ended last week. The Central Bank of the States of West Africa hailed the campaign as a triumph.
The sign on the toilet brush says it best: ”Do not use for personal hygiene.” That admonition was the winner of an anti-lawsuit group’s contest for the wackiest consumer warning label of the year. The contest’s goal is ”to reveal how lawsuits, and concern about lawsuits, have created a need for common-sense warnings on products”.
The African Union has agreed in principle to deploy a peace support mission in the troubled Horn of Africa state of Somalia, which is trying to emerge from 13 years of anarchy, the AU said in a statement on Thursday. The mission will be the first multinational force in Somalia since the end of a failed, United Nations-mandated intervention in 1995.
It is best for a family to be open about suffering from terminal diseases rather than let rumours spread like wildfire, former president Nelson Mandela said in Johannesburg on Thursday after announcing that he lost his son, Makgatho Mandela, earlier in the day to Aids.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?cg=BreakingNews-National&ao=177494">Nelson Mandela’s son dies</a>
The positive growth experienced by the South African vehicle market in 2004 is set to continue in 2005, McCarthy Motor Holdings chairperson Brand Pretorius said on Thursday. Pretorius expects the market to grow by approximately 11% this year. Annual new-vehicle sales have steadily increased over the past five years.
It is indisputably one of the world’s more original languages. For more than half a millennium, the inhabitants of the Spanish Canary Island of La Gomera have communicated over steep slopes and isolated valleys by whistling. Now the whistle language, known as Silbo, has aroused the interest of scientists.
Chronic gambler Dennis Telford had his hand in the till. Both hands, in fact. Over the years, the 44-year-old family man took Aus-million (about R100-million) from the Adelaide trucking firm where he was company secretary. Telford, who pleaded guilty to 63 fraud charges, got hooked on horse races early in life.
The African Union is seeking to act as mediator in the conflict pitting Ugandan government troops and rebels in the north, a spokesperson said on Thursday. President Yoweri Museveni at the weekend ordered the army to resume attacks against the insurgents, after last-minute hitches scuppered a December 31 ceasefire deal.