Botswana’s President Festus Mogae says all southern Africa is confronted with a host of challenges, including poverty, famine, unemployment and vulnerability of economies to drought, the HIV/Aids pandemic and a desire for further access to global markets.
Five months before the September 11 attacks, United States military planners suggested a war game to practise a response to a terrorist attack using a commercial airliner flown into the Pentagon, but senior officers rejected the scenario as ”too unrealistic”.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair flies to the United States on Thursday for one of his most important summits with George Bush, which received added impetus on Wednesday night when an Italian hostage was brutally killed by his Iraqi captors.
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The United Nations’s adviser on Iraq made a surprising attack on Washington’s handling of its year-long occupation on Wednesday night, condemning the detention of prisoners without trial or charge and offering a withering analysis of America’s governance of the country.
South Africans confounded widespread predictions of apathy on Wednesday by queuing in their millions to vote in the country’s third general election since the fall of apartheid. Despite the high turnout and the ANC’s apparent victory, there was a sense of growing impatience among many voters for the better life that they were promised after apartheid’s fall.
Hackers have broken into some of the world’s most powerful computer clusters in recent weeks in an apparently coordinated cyber attack targetting research and academic institutions. Although officials sought on Wednesday to play down the seriousness of the threats, some security experts warned that such a break-in could potentially enable a serious attack on the internet.
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Allegations of political violence and vote rigging continued in KwaZulu-Natal on Thursday morning. Incidents included the shooting of a Democratic Alliance councillor, security forces evacuating African National Congress party agents, and the Inkatha Freedom Party laying another complaint of irregularities with election authorities.
KwaZulu-Natal: Two-million voted
While people across the world have been vowing this month that genocide, as took place in Rwanda 10 years ago, must never be allowed to happen again, two countries in Africa — Côte d’Ivoire and Sudan – stand on the brink of new social and political catastrophes from ethnically manipulated contests for land and power.
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As expected, the race for control of the South African provinces of the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal remains tight. In the Western Cape, with 23% of the votes counted, the African National Congress was only slightly ahead of the official opposition Democratic Alliance, with figures indicating that a hung legislature could result.
Special Report: Elections 2004