New vehicle sales again increased in November, compared to the same month last year, the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of SA (Naamsa) said on Tuesday.

"We take water for granted and it is time to stop taking it for granted. It is not infinitely accessible to us and it has an impact of every area of our lives," says UN water expert Stephen Donkor. He spoke to Irin about plans ahead of a pan-African conference on water utilisation this month.

A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, The Guardian has learned.

The Kyoto climate change pact looked to be in trouble on Tuesday night after the European commission warned that 13 of the EU’s 15 member states were set to miss their emission reduction targets by a huge margin. In a separate development, Russia appeared to turn its back on the protocol.

For two months, a rebel group of Israeli Black Hawk helicopter and F-16 fighter pilots has been denounced as traitors for saying they will no longer bomb Palestinian cities. The line was crossed for most of the pilots with the dropping of the one-ton bomb last year on the home of a Hamas military leader, Salah Shehade, killing him and 14 of his family, mostly children.

Robert Mugabe vowed on Tuesday to haul Zimbabwe out of economic decline, but offered few concrete measures for reversing the slump. Instead, in his state of the nation address to Parliament, President Mugabe blamed foreign ”interference” for Zimbabwe’s plight, denouncing the Commonwealth as an ”Anglo-Saxon unholy alliance”.