Harare | Tuesday THOUSANDS of people living in southern Zimbabwe are facing starvation as critical food shortages loom, aid agencies and officials said this week. The food crisis in southern Zimbabwe has been blamed on a variety of factors, including a devastating cyclone in early 2000, a January drought which destroyed this year’s maize crops, […]

MICHEL SAILHAN, Cairo | Tuesday THE United States, France and other countries are moving ahead with preparations for the world’s biggest war games with some 70 000 troops in Egypt in October, Western diplomats said on Monday. The diplomats said they were virtually certain the war games, dubbed Operation Bright Star, would go head despite […]

Johannesburg | Monday LIBERATION fighters have no need to attack civilians, President Thabo Mbeki declared on Sunday, recalling the “moral” war against South Africa’s apartheid regime. “Even as our enemy and its friends denounced our movement as terrorist, we took strict measures to avoid the use of terror against the people,” Mbeki writes in a […]

NIGER President Mamadou Tandja on Monday reshuffled his government for the first time since the west African country’s fifth republic was formed on January 5, 2000. Prime Minister Hama Amadou was still in charge of a new cabinet of 23 ministers. Ten ministers retained their posts while 13 new faces were brought into the line-up. […]

JUSTIN ARENSTEIN & SAKHILE MOKOENA, Nelspruit | Tuesday MPUMALANGA’S sleepy capital Nelspruit intends creating a red light district as part of an initiative to regulate the region’s growing sex trade. Council representative Delia Oosthuizen confirmed that all six escort agencies in the city had been ordered to immediately move their operations into the central business […]

THE Ugandan government has allowed South African and Spanish firms to bid for two lucrative concessions in the Ugandan power sector, whose privatisation is in final stages, senior finance ministry official Emmanuel Nyirikindi said on Sunday. Nyirikindi said that the two firms — Eskom Enterprises of South Africa and Union Fenosa Internacional of Spain — […]

MORE than 120 Nigerian women have been deported from Benin on allegations of prostitution. A senior Nigerian immigration official, Ekpedeme King, told the television that the young women were deported last week after a raid by Beninois immigration officials. The girls, whose faces were shown on the television, are currently being screened by immigration and […]

A US federal court in Los Angeles on Monday postponed for the second time the sentencing of an Algerian convicted of terrorism in a plot to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport during 2000 millennium celebrations. “The sentencing has been continued until February 14th at (9:00 am) because the defence requested more time,” court representative […]

South African former president Nelson Mandela left South Africa on Monday to take a well-deserved two-week holiday at a secret location with his wife.

SOUTH African bank BoE Ltd announced it had bought private client asset manager Stenham Gestinor for R404-million as part of efforts to boost its investment management and private banking business. The cash deal for the Guernsey-based Stenham Gestinor has already received regulatory and exchange control approval. BoE’s head of investment management Paul Leaf-Wright expected the […]