African airlines have set an ambitious target of reducing the number of accidents by 50% by the year 2010. Since this goal was set at the Association of African Airlines general assembly in Tripoli on December 10 last year — two planes have come down — in Benin and Egypt with a cost of 261 lives.
Sometimes even journalists get lucky. Last week I was stranded for four frustrating hours in Geneva airport, waiting for a connecting flight that somehow had vanished off the computers. Near the check-out counters, I was approached by a grimy tout who snuck up close and leered at me. ”Want to buy some feelthy Christmas cards?” he wheedled.
The celebration of South Africa’s 10-year-old democracy will not resonate in soccer the way things are now. The under-23 squad are on tenterhooks as to whether they’ll be off to Athens later this year, but the biggest blow must be Shakes’s seven-day suspension on the even of the Nations Cup.
January 5. Somewhere in southern Mauritania. Michelle, mon petit baguette, I write this by the guttering light of a burning Mitsubishi. The driver will soon be extinguished and so I must be brief. The weeping has become incessant. At first it was just the Italian bikers, sobbing into their malfunctioning carburettors …
South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki begins his political year alienated from his most powerful ally in Africa, Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, because of South Africa’s obstinate support for Zimbabwe at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting last month.
Zanu-MDC talks: The stumbling blocks
Three major publishers are taking the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education to court over its textbook selection procedures, less than two weeks before the start of the new school year. KwaZulu-Natal schools reopen on January 21.
The African National Congress is launching its 2004 election campaign on January 10 and 11 in Durban. "The ANC hopes to convince the voters of KwaZulu-Natal that a clear ANC majority in the province is critical for faster progress towards the elimination of poverty," the <i>ANC Today</i> newsletter said on Friday.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=29452">ANC manifesto TV coverage ‘unfair'</a>
The vice-president of the main opposition Malawi Congress Party resigned on Thursday to form a new political movement. Gwanda Chakuamba (69) said he was acting under pressure from his supporters, who have been asking him to form his own party to contest May general elections.
South Africa’s Department of Labour is in the process of wrapping up its investigations into the cause of a cableway accident that injured two people last Friday in Hartbeespoort in the North West. The final report on the accident is expected to be finalised in the next four weeks.
Sixty-five people, most of them children under the age of five, have died of malnutrition and other hunger-related causes in the Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo over the past five months. The highest number of malnutrition deaths in the city were of babies and children between the ages of one month and five years.