OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Sunday SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki is expected to visit Kinshasa on Tuesday to meet the new leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a foreign ministry representative said on the weekend. Mbeki, who is in Switzerland to attend the annual economic summit in Davos, will make a stopover in […]

A NORTHERN Province community that invaded a military base two years ago has threatened to re-invade it after failing to get a response to a land claim they lodged five years ago. Seven of the 1 000 Gumbu community members who marched to the Madimbo Corridor military base in September 1999 were arrested and are […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Allahabad, India | Saturday THE Dalai Lama, the supreme spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, has urged Christians and Muslims to accept that there is more than one valid religion. “Christianity and Islam have a very strong concept of one religion. I think that should change. I hope that will change,” he told reporters […]

A SMALL group of demonstrators gathered outside the Belfast Magistrate’s Court in Mpumalanga when a local businessman, his friend and a widow appeared on various charges of child sex abuse. The demonstrators placed placards against the court’s fence, some of which read: “No bail for child abusers”. The widow is accused of forcing her son, […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Bhuj, India | Sunday SOLDIERS digging through the ruins of crushed buildings on Sunday pursued the faint voices of survivors of India’s devastating earthquake, bolstered by the rescue of three people pulled from the rubble 36 hours after the disaster struck. But with more than 6_000 confirmed dead and authorities saying the toll […]

LEADING Tanzanian opposition politician Ibrahim Lipumba has been arrested after the government claimed to have discovered plans by his party to “wreak havoc” across the country. Lipumba, chairman of Tanzania’s leading opposition party, the Civic United Front (CUF), was arrested with at least 50 other members of the party. The CUF is planning nationwide demonstrations […]

A UN expert has criticised the Zimbabwe government for the alleged intimidation of judges in the ongoing debate over land reforms in the southern African country. “The deterioration in the rule of law and the undermining of the independence of the judiciary is a matter of grave concern to the international community,” Dato’Param Cumaraswamy, a […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Davos, Switzerland | Saturday FRUSTRATED with what he sees as the failure of western aid programs in Africa, South African President Thabo Mbeki has emerged as one of the architects of a plan to boost private sector investment and develop more home-grown solutions to the continent’s deep economic and social problems. Mbeki and […]

MALAWI President Bakili Muluzi has denied weeks of public speculation that he intends changing the country’s constitution and running for a third term in office in 2004. Malawi information minister Clement Stambuli said Muluzi would honour existing constitutional restrictions limiting presidents to two consecutive five-year terms. Stambuli tried last week to defuse growing civil society […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kinshasa | Saturday THE Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) new president, Joseph Kabila, has boosted hopes for an end to his country’s complex civil war, vowing in his inaugural address to work for peace – after which, he said, democratic elections would take place. General Kabila took the oath of office on Friday, […]