THE Zimbabwe government has described as “uncorroborated” a report by an international panel of high-ranking lawyers who said that democracy and the rule of law in the country were “in the gravest peril.” In the report produced for the International Bar Association (IBA), the laywers said the government of President Robert Mugabe was deeply implicated […]
PRESSURE is mounting on Swazi authorities to disclose the nature of King Mswati IIIs protracted illness following unconfirmed media reports that he was poisoned. A religious leader accused the government of fuelling public despondency by hiding the facts surrounding the 33-year-old kings illness. “They must disregard the culture of secrecy because the king is the […]
AN Angolan army helicopter crashed at the weekend in central Angola, killing five of its 13 passengers, most of them military personnel, the Portuguese news agency Lusa said on Monday. A military official interviewed by the agency said the fate of the eight other passengers aboard the Russian-built helicopter that crashed on Saturday was unknown. […]
LIBYAN leader Moamer Kadhafi and Namibian President Sam Nujoma met on Monday and stressed the “importance of African unity,” Libyan television reported. Nujoma, who arrived in Tripoli on Monday, discussed the setting up of pan-African institutions and bilateral relations with Colonel Kadhafi, one of the most ardent proponents of such ideas on the continent. The […]
THE Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) on Wednesday called on President Thabo Mbeki to declare amnesty for all former freedom fighters on Freedom Day. PAC deputy president Motsoko Pheko said a number of such prisoners were languishing in the prisons of the “new South Africa”. He accused the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of being biased in […]
AN outbreak of meningitis that is sweeping across Africa has killed at least 3_500 people, the international Red Cross said on Wednesday. “From the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, a total of 38_000 cases have been documented, but many more are likely to have gone unreported,” said the International Federation of Red Cross and […]
A MAN who pleaded guilty to skinning and beheading a dog was sentenced by a North Carolina court to three years probation and ordered to read the “Lassie” books. Jason Vincent Revels, 19, was charged with felony animal cruelty in the November death of his mother’s mixed pit bull. At a hearing on Monday, Revels […]
THE captain and crew of a vessel suspected of ferrying children destined for slavery appeared in a Benin court on Monday, judicial sources said in the capital Cotonou. The investigating magistrate in charge of a probe into the status of 43 minors aboard the ship heard Nigerian Lawrence Oghototuya and his crew, who had been […]
EMMANUEL DEFOULOY, Brussels | Wednesday DECADES before the 1994 Rwandan genocide an anti-Tutsi apartheid created a mind-set in school children that Tutsis were a sub-human class, a middle-aged Tutsi woman in tears told a jury in an historic trial here this week. The system created both “consenting victims and potential executioners,” the woman, who escaped […]
A 61-year-old South African man who was fitted with an external artificial heart died on April 15 in Cape Town’s City Park Hospital, the facility disclosed on Monday. The man, who had asked not to be identified, was given the heart – a pump made from polyurethane with two ventricles – by a 10-member team […]