Lesotho, surrounded by its giant neighbour, South Africa, is facing a third successive year of food shortages. According to the United Nations World Food Programme, a poor maize harvest earlier this year has meant that the Basotho are in for another hard winter.
A United Nations helicopter on a routine flight in eastern Sierra Leone crashed into a hillside on Tuesday, killing all 24 people on board, a UN spokesperson said. The helicopter, belonging to the Siberian-based UT Air charter company, was on a routine morning flight.
At least 6 000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were left homeless after a fire gutted parts of the sprawling Pabbo camp in northern Uganda, destroying hundreds of grass-thatched huts where the IDPs had been living, local leaders and the army said.
Côte d’Ivoire’s political opposition met President Laurent Gbagbo on Tuesday for the first time in three months, with high hopes that a rebel boycott of the talks will not impede efforts to reconcile the troubled African cocoa giant. The day of talks aimed to revive a moribund, French-brokered peace pact signed in January last year.
The world must move quickly to avoid a repeat of the Rwandan genocide in Sudan’s western Darfur region, Chadian President Idriss Deby said on Wednesday. As Deby spoke, United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan kicked off separate visits to Sudan, both focused on Darfur.
Gun owners came under fire in the Pretoria High Court on Wednesday for the late filing of an application to have the implementation of the Firearms Control Act delayed beyond midnight. Their application was dismissed by Judge Ben du Plessis, who found there was no merit to the application.
The conservative African Christian Democratic Party has come out firing in support of a Christian picket against the Firearms Control Act outside Parliament on Wednesday. The picket was aimed at expressing opposition to the Firearms Control Act, which comes into operation at midnight on Wednesday.
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After more than a decade on the beat in central Cape Town, the City Community Patrol Board must cease its activities by Friday, according to the South African Police Service. However, there was unhappiness with the closure of the rent-a-cops, as they were commonly known, with 70 employees not absorbed into the police.
The Presidency has confirmed that the five-year contract of the Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, Gill Marcus, expires on Wednesday. President Thabo Mbeki has consulted with Marcus about the renewal of her contract and she has indicated she would like to discuss other matters with the president regarding her future.
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Tanks, troops and bulldozers reoccupied a Gaza town on Tuesday in a bid to curb Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, after the crudely made missiles claimed their first Israeli victims, a man and a three-year-old boy. Hamas responded by firing more of the unguided rockets as the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, visited Sderot, the scene of Monday’s killing of the boy.
‘Israel should stop targeting Arafat’