TWENTY THREE Somalian boat people died from thirst and hunger in a boat stranded off the coast of Yemen where they had sought refuge, a UN refugee official said. The Somalians had spent 12 days at sea when their boat broke down in the Gulf of Aden. The Yemeni coast guard was able to save […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, San Francisco | Sunday WHEN analysts and other observers of the Internet industry look ahead to 2001, they see nothing but pain. And like a canary in a coal mine, San Francisco, the epicentre of the Internet boom, is starting to show real signs that the dot-com craze is running out of air. […]

LIBYAN leader Muammar Gaddafi has once again distanced himself from terrorism in an interview to be published by the German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Libya under Gaddafi has been widely accused of backing and organising terrorist attacks. Gaddafi said new possibilities to resolve conflicts by democracy, in hotspots such as Nicaragua and Northern Ireland, meant […]

THE UN Security Council has urged Rwanda and Uganda to halt military offensives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and to withdraw their forces from that country. But it stopped well short of reacting to a call from the government of DRC to slap an arms embargo and other sanctions on Rwanda and Uganda, […]

SOUTHERN African foreign ministers are meeting in Pretoria to discuss a constitutional crisis in the Comoros. Also attending the meeting will be ministers from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) troika – Algeria, Togo and Zambia – and OAU Secretary General Salim Ahmed Salim. The three-island republic between Madagascar and east Africa was plunged into […]

GINA DOGGETT, Accra | Saturday GHANAIAN voters have opted to turn their backs on the past, electing opposition leader John Kufuor to succeed longtime ruler Jerry Rawlings in the country’s first democratic transfer of power. Rawlings’ protege John Atta Mills, the incumbent vice president, conceded defeat as near-final results showed Kufuor with an unassailable 15% […]

GAMBIA’S President Yaya Jammeh has announced that his government plans to introduce Islamic Sharia law from next year. Jammeh, who was born into a Catholic family and converted to Islam in the mid-80s, promised however to guarantee that religious freedom would be respected. He has been in power since 1994 in this small west African […]

ANGOLAN President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has confirmed that new elections will be held in his war-torn country some time in the second half of 2002. The last and only elections to date in the country were held in 1992. In that poll, Dos Santos’ MPLA won a majority of seats in parliament, which it […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, San Francisco | Sunday TWO party-pooping California researchers have found that the familiar tingle on the tongue caused by the fizzy drink revellers love to guzzle as they toast the New Year is no pleasure at all. In fact, the fizz of champagne can be downright painful. ”The tingle you get from a […]

A seven-year-old boy and his nine-year-old sister, who were kidnapped from their mother’s house in the Karos district in Upington a week ago, have been found dead. The pair, Mariette and Estevan Olyn, were taken from their home last Friday by a man their mother apparently knew. Their bodies were found in a deserted house […]