ILDA JACOBS, Washington DC | Thursday AMERICANS are discovering one of South Africa’s best-kept secrets: dunking rusks in their morning coffee. Until recently freshly baked rusks could not be bought for love or money anywhere in the United States. But Kalahari Limited, a South African-owned company in Atlanta, has changed that. The dried biscuit invented […]

EBOLA fever has claimed five more lives in the north Ugandan district of Gulu in the past 24 hours, bringing the total death toll to 80, the government said. Twelve more patients were also admitted to the two hospitals in and around Gulu town, bringing the total number of those affected by the disease to […]

SWAZI groups meeting in Johannesburg have called for an international campaign to isolate the tiny mountain kingdom to avoid civil war. “We continue to have an undemocratic, despotic, totalitarian monarchy in Swaziland,” said Bongani Masuku, secretary general of the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN), an umbrella organisation working for democracy. The campaign comes after two weeks […]

THE case of six Mpumalanga men accused of hanging a suspected witch from a graveyard tree has been set for trial after being postponed eight times over the past year. The men allegedly hanged Simon “Killer” Magagula, 30, on December 26 last year after accusing him of bewitching roosters that pecked people and killed them. […]

A SECOND decomposing body has been found in bushes where a man was caught cooking a human liver and thumb over a fire near Hazyview in Mpumalanga. A team of 40 people and police sniffer dogs found the body in a donga, 30m from where the first body was found in a shallow grave near […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, East London | Thursday EASTERN Cape premier Makhenkesi Stofile has vetoed a disciplinary committee’s axing of the province’s agriculture and land affairs department head, instead appointing him to run the transport department. Zola Gebeda was suspended in March and was subsequently found guilty by a disciplinary committee on 16 counts relating to administrative […]

NIGERIA plans to spend 50bn naira (around $42m) next year to boost its epileptic power supply system, Power and Steel Minister Olusegun Agagu has said. The money will be used to improve generating, transmission and distribution capacity of the inefficient state-run electricity company NEPA, the minister said this week. He said 30 billion naira was […]

HOBBS GAMA, Blantyre | Thursday MALAWI President Bakili Muluzi unexpectedly fired his entire 33 member cabinet on Thursday morning amidst growing corruption and financial mismanagement charges. President Muluzi’s office announced on State radio that all executive government matters would be handled directly by the presidency until a new cabinet is appointed. Office of the President […]

MALAWI’S telecommunications parastatal, Malawi Telecommunications Limited (MTL), this week launched an ambitious five-year strategic plan to triple the number of fixed-line telephones in the country in an apparent attempt to beat off competition from mobile and cellular telephone networks. MTL chief executive Emmanuel Mahuka said that the plan would include upgrading the country’s existing 45 […]

GOLD fever is set to grip South Africa’s most famous historical mining town next week when thousands of gold panners gather in Pilgrim’s Rest to battle it out at the annual National Gold Panning Championships. Mpumalanga Tourism Authority (MTA) spokesman Norman Madzhiga said the annual championships on November 11 had attracted 120 ‘professional’ entries, with […]