MOZAMBICAN President Joaquim Chissano arrived in Cuba for a week-long official visit on Sunday, in hopes to expand bilateral relations with the communist-ruled island. The Mozambican leader, a frequent guest in Havana since Mozambique gained independence in 1975, was met at the airport by Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque. He is scheduled to meet […]

Cape Town | Monday UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said on Monday that child mortality rates in Afghanistan, where thousands of children die of preventable diseases each year, will worsen as refugees flood from the war-battered country. “The plight of Afghanistan’s children was terrible even before the recent crisis,” she told the American Academy of […]

Upington | Monday SIX men were arrested on Friday night in Louisvale, Upington after a nine-month old baby was raped and indecently assaulted, Northern Cape police said. Provincial police representative Captain Cherelle Ehlers said that the baby girl’s 16-year-old mother left the child in another person’s care around 10pm on Saturday night while she went […]

MARC LAVINE, Washington | Monday US FORCES are prepared to kill terror suspect Osama bin Laden if he resists capture, a top official said on Sunday, as Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban ordered defences to be boosted to thwart fresh US commando raids. US warplanes meanwhile launched stinging new airstrikes on Taliban targets as US Secretary of […]

Johannesburg | Monday The NNP’s departure from the DA raises the issue of what will become of the public positions of DA representatives who wish to follow the NNP. Those who were elected as NNP party members, before the formation of the DA, will retain their posts. But those NNP sympathisers who have been elected […]

THE stricken 10_000-ton cargo ship Ikan Tanda was scuttled off the Western Cape coast on Saturday, salvors Smit Pentow Marine said on Monday. Spokeswoman Clare du Plooy-Gomes said the ship finally disappeared beneath the water at 8.30pm about 200 miles offshore, west of Cape Town and outside South African territorial waters. The end came for […]

Baku | Wednesday DRUG trafficking from Afghanistan has increased since the start of the US-led military strikes there, Russian Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said on Tuesday during a meeting with his Azeri counterpart. ”Since the beginning of military operations in Afghanistan, drug traffickers have been trying to increase the volume of narcotics smuggled in (from […]

Pretoria | Monday HOPES for an interest rate cut received a boost on Monday with a 3,5% point drop in the money supply. Should South Africans receive a one percent rate cut it will give them the lowest interest rate since 1986 — just in time for Christmas. The SA Reserve Bank (SARB) reported that […]

MORE than 180 mini bus taxis were impounded around the Umtata region over the weekend as part of efforts to root out taxi-related violence. The area head of crime prevention, Director Wayne Hackart said the taxis were impounded mainly for defects and in some cases for loading passengers at taxi ranks that had been closed […]

London | Friday A HANDFUL of US special forces are operating in southern Afghanistan, a senior US government official confirmed today amid growing indications that the campaign’s ”ground phase” was close to beginning. The official said that a small number of US forces were supporting efforts by the intelligence community to undermine the Taliban regime. […]