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/ 21 October 2004
A witness in the Boeremag treason trial, former Bela-Bela farmer Deon Crous, described on Thursday preparations for a coup attempt, including renting cars for car bombs, stockpiling ammunition and making petrol bombs with beer bottles and government-issue condoms.
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/ 21 October 2004
The lawyer representing the man accused of kidnapping and killing Johannesburg student Leigh Matthews has withdrawn from the case, the prosecution confirmed on Thursday. Randburg senior prosecutor Pieter Erasmus said he had received a fax from Louis Weinstein on Wednesday indicating that he had withdrawn from the case.
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/ 21 October 2004
Panic is beginning to set in among drought-hit families in Ethiopia’s Somali region, where poor rains have exacerbated water shortages, the government and aid organisations said on Wednesday. More than four million people live in the dry, remote region, which is made up of nine zones and has a 1 600-km border with Somalia.
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/ 21 October 2004
More than 700 women have volunteered to lie in bed for 60 days to simulate some of the effects of weightlessness, the European Space Agency announced on Thursday. The female test subjects will lie in bed, with their heads slightly tilted downwards at six degrees below the horizontal, for 60 days.
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/ 21 October 2004
Africa’s leading Anglican churchman, Nigeria’s Archbishop Peter Akinola, condemned the worldwide church’s response to the controversy over the ordination of an openly homosexual bishop as wholly inadequate and insulting, in a statement received in Lagos, Nigeria, on Thursday.
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/ 21 October 2004
President Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader for more than 45 years, broke his left knee and his right arm in a fall, and urged the Caribbean country’s population of 11-million to stay calm, a government statement said on Thursday. TV cameras captured the incident on Wednesday when the leader stumbled as he was descending a flight of stairs.
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/ 21 October 2004
The United Nations refugee agency has begun repatriating to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) some of the 10 000 refugees who fled to the Central African Republic (CAR) when war broke out in the DRC in 1998. A first batch of 101 DRC nationals were ferried on Wednesday across the Ubangi River from the CAR.
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/ 21 October 2004
Almost two years after the diamond industry committed itself to preventing trade in conflict diamonds, retailers in the world’s biggest markets are failing to live up to their promise, according to two international NGOs. A new report is based on a survey of the diamond jewellery retail sector’s implementation of self-regulation in line with the Kimberley Process.
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/ 21 October 2004
Climate change, predicted by the United Nations to change the way most people live over the next 100 years, is the least important of the world’s immediate problems, says a group of economists, including three Nobel prize winners, who were asked to prioritise how money should be spent on helping the world’s poor.
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/ 21 October 2004
Small retail pharmacies will soon be extinct in South Africa unless new regulations governing medicine pricing and dispensing margins are changed, according to the group leader of listed health and beauty retailer New Clicks Holdings, Trevor Honneysett. He also said the legislation has not succeeded in reducing medicine prices.