Luanda | Thursday ANTI-personnel and anti-tank landmines killed 110 people and injured 140 others during June in six of Angola’s eighteen provinces, a UN report said on Wednesday. About 500 000 people are trapped in areas littered with landmines or where fighting continues to rage in the 26-year civil war, the report said. Estimates vary […]

Some 272 000 people fled fighting between rebels and government forces in Angola from January to June this year, a UN report said on Tuesday. Displacement of civilians mostly peasant farmers occurred in 10 of the troubled southern African country’s 18 provinces, the report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) […]

Cape Town | Wednesday NEW mortality statistics have shown that violence rivals Aids as a threat to South African society, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang told a news conference on Wednesday. But her assertion, backing up President Thabo Mbeki, is at odds with UNAids figures which suggest that annual deaths due to Aids are nearly 10 […]

A GROUP of armed men made off with a haul of cash, diamonds and precious metals from a Swissair freight container shortly after it was unloaded at Johannesburg airport in South Africa last week, the Swiss airline and a German newspaper report said on Monday. Between five and seven gunmen, according to witnesses, raided the […]

SAKHILE MOKOENA Pietersburg | Thursday CIRCUMCISION schools should be regulated without “assassinating” African culture and customs, urged Pan Africanist Youth Congress (Payco) leader in the Northern Province, Matome Mashao, on Thursday. His call follows the cancellation of a provincial circumcision indaba, or meeting, that was to be held on Tuesday but was scuppered when traditional […]

A 79-YEAR-OLD Northern Province farmer and his elderly wife have been briefly hospitalised after three armed men ambushed and beat them on Sunday night. The knife-wielding attackers reportedly lured Hermanus Johannes Oosthuizen out of his smallholding house near Pietersburg by taunting his dog at 10pm on Sunday night. “His 71-year old wife, Gerbrecht, heard his […]

MANNETJIE Ganaseb is probably the only person in Namibia who can claim to have been trapped underneath a wild, black rhino and lived to tell the tale. Ganaseb, the Manager of Save The Rhino (STR) Trust’s camel patrol team, was lucky to escape with his life after a close encounter with a black rhino cow […]

SOME 14 000 combatants in Sierra Leone’s protracted civil war have laid down their weapons under a UN-supervised disarmament programme, the UN mission in Sierra Leone said this week. Unamsil force commander Major-General Martin Luther Agwei said facilities at the key eastern diamond-rich district of Kono had been ”overstretched” at the weekend by rebels and […]