In his first meeting with a high-ranking US official in a year, Swaziland’s King Mswati III was told of Washington’s concern that the slow pace of democratic reform might compromise the kingdom’s trade links with the United States, at great cost to economic progress.

Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi has failed in his attempts to ”whitewash history and portray himself as a peace-loving anti-apartheid activist”, say former Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) members and investigators.

”Mobster’s associate ‘bribed’ Malatsi to expedite Plett development” could be a synthesis of headlines since last week when New National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk accused David Malatsi, a deputy minister and senior member of his own party, of irregularly approving Roodefontein.

Interest rates, not the threat of war in Iraq, are the key factor in the recent surge in the gold price, analysts said this week. ”War has nothing to do with the gold price, to be quite honest,” John Clemmow of Investec said. The price of gold touched an ounce this week.

A British woman who had her arm ripped off by a lioness she tried to stroke at a Spanish animal sanctuary was yesterday recovering at a hospital in the town of Villajoyosa, near Alicante.