FOUR people were seriously injured in northern Angola in a bomb attack blamed on UNITA rebels launched on the eve of the country’s 25th anniversary of independence, police said. The attack occurred around midnight Friday in the town of Uije, 300 km east of Luanda. Before the celebrations, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos offered a […]

GRIFFIN SHEA and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Monday AS the deadline for President Robert Mugabe’s government to obey Supreme Court orders to return the rule of law to the country’s commercial farming areas, a new surge of illegal “resettlement” operations has overrun scores of white-owned farms. Zimbabwe’s government says the ruling declaring its land reform […]

Own Correspondent, Doha | Monday SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki has sharply criticised Israel for its ”excessive use of sophisticated weapons” in the Middle East crisis, and called for a shake-up of the United Nations to ”reflect the realities” of the modern world order. Speaking as the chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, Mbeki said Israel’s […]

JAILED anti-apartheid cleric Allan Boesak may lose a 10-month remission of his sentence because he was caught with a mobile phone in his cell, a prisons spokesman said. The discovery might also scupper a court application by Boesak to have his three-year sentence commuted to correctional supervision. Boesak, a flamboyant former leader of the ANC […]

A COMMISSION of inquiry into alleged match-fixing by disgraced former South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje will resume on January 25, say sources close to the commission. Cronje, who has been banned for life by the United Cricket Board of South Africa (UCB), stands to earn immunity from prosecution if Judge Edwin King, who heads […]

AUSTRIAN rescuers have dug through the night to recover the remains of at least 155 people from the incinerated wreck of an Alpine train packed with skiers. Pathologists will have to use DNA tests to identify many of the victims of Austria’s worst peacetime disaster on the Kitzsteinhorn mountain on Saturday. Officials have established the […]

SOUTH African retailer Woolworths’s Financial Services unit and Mercantile Bank have formed a joint venture to launch a VISA branded credit card for the retailer’s customers. They said in a statement the move was in line with global trends by retailers to offer their customers financial products. ”Mercantile Bank have assisted other non-traditional players by […]

THE death toll from an outbreak of yellow fever in Guinea has risen to 42 people and the epidemic is spreading northwards, a health official said. Seventy-five cases have been diagnosed within the central Mamou region, of which 39 have died so far. Three more people died in the Labe district of the Fouta Djalon […]

THE Zimbabwean Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) has agreed to settle a debt owed to South African counterpart Eskom and began the process with a sizeable payment in October, Eskom said this week. Eskom said ZESA’s decision followed a day long workshop between the two firms in October where it was decided that the long-standing multi-million […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pietermaritzburg | Friday SOUTH Africa is set to lose some of its foreign markets for agricultural products with the declaration of the entire KwaZulu-Natal province as a foot-and-mouth restricted area after the disease spread beyond the existing quarantine zone into the Valley of a Thousand Hills. The province is likely to face a […]