OWN CORRESPONDENT , Antananarivo | Friday 5.00pm. PLANES carrying 12 tons of aid from the UN’s World Food Programme took off on Friday for northeast Madagascar, as hundreds of thousands of people on the island suffered dire hardship after two cyclones. Two Antonov planes belonging to the Madagascan army, each carrying three tons of food, […]
THE UN Security Council will hold closed-door consultations on Friday on the situation in Western Sahara, where several hundred people recently held demonstrations. The United Nations has been trying for more than eight years to organise a referendum to decide whether the former Spanish colony should be incorporated into Morocco, which controls most of the […]
THE French warship Jeanne d’Arc has been rerouted from Mozambique to Madagascar to bring aid to hundreds of thousands of cyclone victims and is expected there within the next few days. The helicopter-carrier left flood-stricken Mozambique late on Wednesday for the Indian Ocean island, 800 kilometres across the Mozambique Channel. The vessel had been in […]
US President Bill Clinton has said that Amadou Diallo, the African immigrant whose shooting death by police stirred turmoil in New York, might not have been shot if he had been a white man in a white neighbourhood. Clinton talked about the Diallo case during a White House meeting of more than 150 religious leaders […]
REUSABLE needles used for a national treatment campaign in Egypt decades ago are the cause of the high number of liver disease cases in the country today, researchers said. hundreds of thousands of Egyptians received injections for a common but serious disease called schistosomiasis, which is caused by a parasite in the blood, from the […]
Steven Friedman WORM’S EYE VIEW This week’s Human Rights Commission hearings could influence our economic growth prospects as much as last month’s budget. We can have no growth without investment – but the way we handle politics and government may do as much as economic policies, if not more, to shape whether people invest. The […]
Thebe Mabanga IN YOUR EAR Gauteng youth station Yfm 99.2 has broken new ground by setting up an exchange programme with a foreign broadcaster. The two-year-old music station has linked up with Rythm 93.7 fm of Nigeria to exchange expertise in areas of management, news and information presentation, and music content. Rythm is a two-year-old […]
Desmond Balmer An innovative marine park on a small Tanzanian island that can accommodate only 14 guests at a time was last month declared the global winner of the British Airways Tourism for Tomorrow Awards. Chumbe Island Coral Park, in an idyllic setting south- west of Zanzibar Town, was chosen as the winner ahead of […]
Mercedes Sayagues Zimbabwe’s farm invasions over the past two weeks have peaked at more than 330 countrywide. In some provinces, the wave is ebbing, and squatters are leaving. But not in Mashonaland Central, where they vow to stay until the parliamentary elections in April. “We will whip Dabengwa,” boasted a war veteran, haranguing a few […]
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has accused ex-rebel leader Foday Sankoh of hampering peace in Sierra Leone. Annan, in a report to the Security Council, said Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front (RUF), although now part of the government, were hostile to U.N. peacekeepers and contributed to rising tensions in the tiny Western African nation.