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/ 3 December 2004
A series of blunders by state-owned rail company Spoornet has brought the $5-billion (R30-billion) revamp of Zambia’s railway infrastructure to a standstill. The fiasco, which has resulted in the suspension of senior Spoornet executives and the institution of a forensic audit, has also raised questions about Spoornet’s capacity to assist the continent to revive its railways, many of which have ground to a halt.
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/ 3 December 2004
Colonel Peter Mbobo was tried for and found guilty of a strange offence this week: setting aside his regular duties to help provide security backup for President Thabo Mbeki. As a result he was charged with 21 days AWOL, subsistence and travel fraud, backdating an order appointing an acting officer in his stead and a catch-all charge of "prejudicing military discipline" for the time he spent away from his normal duties.
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/ 3 December 2004
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Thursday ruled out any regime change in his country and taunted British Prime Minister Tony Blair as he opened his ruling Zanu-PF party congress which is due to renew the party’s top leadership. ”Regime change Mr Blair, who are you to talk of regime change in Zimbabwe?,” said Mugabe.
Mugabe calls for unity
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/ 3 December 2004
Sydney’s Lord Mayor has angered citizens of Australia’s largest city and Prime Minister John Howard by decorating the town hall with a single tree in a modest festive show seen as an effort to avoid offending non-Christian immigrants. The symbol of Sydney’s Christmas is a lonely tree on the town hall balcony.
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/ 3 December 2004
Renewed hostilities between the African National Congress and its left-wing allies are likely to fuel growing demands within the South African Communist Party for the party to stand independently in elections. Support for the go-it-alone strategy grew at SACP provincial congresses this year, where it received majority support in six of its nine provinces.
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/ 3 December 2004
The profiling of donors by the South African National Blood Service (SANBS) smacked of racism, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Thursday. She was referring to an admission by the SANBS that it racially profiled blood donations and that the Health Department was aware of this. Tshabalala-Msimang said she should have been consulted.
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/ 3 December 2004
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, threw his weight behind holding totally new elections in Ukraine on Thursday, rejecting the idea favoured by the European Union of a quick repeat of the fraud-ridden runoff vote that has pitched the country into crisis.
Signs of compromise in Ukraine
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/ 3 December 2004
The Bush administration is funding sexual health projects that teach children that HIV can be contracted through sweat and tears, touching genitals can result in pregnancy, and that a 43-day-old foetus is a thinking person. A congressional analysis of more than a dozen federally funded ”abstinence-only programmes” unveiled a litany of ”false, misleading and distorted information”.
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/ 3 December 2004
The conversation had turned towards the literary potential of the Garden Route, but despite the Major’s staccato insistences that he had once skimmed a slim volume about a resourceful prostitute with a wooden leg living in Knysna, it was agreed that nothing readable had ever been set in the bosky territory that lay beyond the polo field.
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/ 3 December 2004
Salitun Lu in the Chaoyang district is known as Beijing’s "Bar Street". With more than 200 bars to choose from, how do you decide where to go and sip on Tsingtao beer? One suggestion is to flip a coin. Heads means three bars to the right, tails means every third bar to the left. <i>Escape</i> gets a taste of the bar culture that has taken hold of the Chinese capital.