There are strong perceptions that many South African companies working elsewhere in Africa come across as arrogant, disrespectful, aloof and careless in their attitude towards local business communities, work seekers and even governments.

A surprise decision by Angola to reject genetically modified food aid threatens to disrupt distributions to 1,9-million vulnerable people — many of them newly returned after the country’s two-decade civil war — says the United Nations’s World Food Programme, which is already battling funding shortfalls for its programme in Angola.

For Suzanne, it was also about sexual experimentation. ”I wanted to try out some things I’d never done before. Maybe I wanted to be a bit perverted, a bit dirty, but I didn’t feel I could do that within a relationship because a boyfriend would judge me.” Thousands of women are turning to the internet in search not of love but of sex, writes

A newspaper report that 100 000 civil servants were infected with HIV/Aids was based on a ”resource document … not yet finalised into a report”. This is according to the Director General of the Department of Social Development, Vusi Madonsela, and a researcher with the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Study of Aids.

Zimbabwean electoral officials on Monday said a by-election that was marred by violence, intimidation, vote buying and rigging at the weekend had been won by President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party. The weekend election was marred by violent clashes culminating in the shooting dead of an opposition supporter.

Last summer every sea creature across an area about twice the size of Lesotho was asphyxiated by severely depleted oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico. The same phenomenon, the marine equivalent of the ozone hole, happened off South America, China, Japan, south-east Australia, New Zealand and up to 150 other places.