Paris | Thursday REFUGEES and farmers struggling to survive in a parched climate may one day bless a Namibian desert beetle which collects droplets of fog on its back in order to survive. The tenebrionid beetle thrives in one of the most hellish places on Earth thanks to microscopic bumps and troughs on its back, […]

THE Zimbabwe government has approved the commercialisation of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) into a public company wholly owned by the government. The Herald reported that the ZBC commercialisation Bill will soon go to parliament. The Bill intends to split the public broadcaster into two separate companies: one responsible for Broadcasting and the other for […]

TWO South African Airways flights were grounded on Thursday night, after flight attendants and personnel in Cape Town discovered a latex glove and “white powerdery substance” on a plane being readied for flight to Johannesburg. According to SAA, all personnel were ordered to leave the aircraft. The police were called, and chemical decontamination specialists Waste […]

THE South African government is concerned about the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, and has called for constraint in the use by the US of military strikes, an official said on Tuesday. “While South Africa recognises the right of the United States government to track down the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks to […]

SIX staff members at the US consulate general in Durban, South Africa, were taken to a hospital for tests after an anthrax scare Tuesday, said public relations officer Amelia Broderick. She said the secretary to consul general Craig Kuehl opened a typed envelope, addressed to the consulate general, which contained “an unidentified white powder”. “We […]

EGYPTIAN President Hosni Mubarak offered support to the United States in its war on terrorism, but reiterated his opposition to a prolonged conflict that goes beyond Afghanistan, in an interview with Newsweek magazine. “I support the United States in fighting terrorism,” Mubarak said in the interview to appear in the weekly’s Monday edition. “We suffered […]

GLENDA DANIELS, Johannesburg | Friday AMENDMENTS to the Labour Relations Act – recently hailed as a major breakthrough between labour, business and the government – remain bedeviled by controversial sticking points and may not see the light of day this year. Hitches remain over the right to strike on retrenchments, seen as the major concession […]

A CRIPPLING indefinite strike launched by pilots and cabin crew of ailing carrier Air Afrique continued for a third day on Friday as talks between the protestors and the management failed. “The meeting with the director-general did not elicit satisfactory responses to our grievances, therefore the strike will continue,” said Denis Attiba, representative for the […]

An Egyptian Islamic militant presumed close to chief terror suspect Osama bin Laden was killed while handling a bomb dropped by US aircraft on Afghanistan, the head of an Islamic information agency said on Thursday. The Egyptian, named as Abu Bassir al-Masri, an alias, was killed Friday near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, Yasser al-Serri, head […]