DUNCAN MARTELL AND REED STEVENSON, San Francisco, Tokyo | Wednesday A DAMAGING new computer worm was spreading like wildfire across the Internet on Wednesday, hitting both home users and businesses in an outbreak that could prove more widespread and costly than the Code Red viruses, computer security experts said. Known as ”Nimda”, which spells admin […]

PARENTS and villagers gathered in a small Mpumalanga courtroom on Tuesday where six boys aged between nine and 11 appeared on charges of allegedly gang-raping a 10-year-old girl. The boys, who are all Grade 3 pupils at a primary school in Nhlazatje, Badplaas, were not asked to plead in the Elukwatini magistrate’s court and were […]

ZIMBABWE’S top politicians have endorsed a land deal brokered in Nigeria which aims to end the country’s land crisis, the state-owned Herald reported on Tuesday. The politburo of the ruling Zanu-PF party met on Monday, endorsed the agreement signed in Abuja, Nigeria, earlier this month and called for its speedy implementation, the newspaper said. Under […]

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 […]