Zambia broke the regional silence on Tuesday over the deteriorating political conditions in Zimbabwe, telling its counterparts in the Southern African Development Community to stop pretending ”all is well in Zimbabwe”. Zimbabweans, who are already jumping the border into South Africa in droves, are now also flooding into Zambia seeking food.
United States President George Bush suffered a fresh setback on Tuesday when a top White House aide, Lewis ”Scooter” Libby, was found guilty of perjury in relation to events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Bush, whose polling rates are already the worst of his six years in office as a result of Iraq, watched the verdict on television in the Oval office.
Africa’s biggest bank by assets, Standard Bank, increased normalised headline earnings per share by 20%, driven by strong growth in corporate and retail lending, the group said on Wednesday. The bank said normalised headline EPS for the year to end-December increased to 796,4 cents per share.
Russia is to replace its military doctrine with a more hawkish version that boldly identifies Nato and the West as its greatest danger. In a statement posted on its website, Russia’s powerful security council said it no longer considered global terrorism as its biggest danger.
The correctional services committee in Parliament on Tuesday rejected a report on the escape of Annanias Mathe from Pretoria’s C-Max prison. The report found that Mathe had probably escaped by squeezing himself through a tiny window and then walked over the roof of the maximum-security prison.
For Merline Momo Azeufac, a teacher at Balefock village in western Cameroon, the days of fearing nightfall while correcting pupils’ work are over. She’s no longer hostage to the poor light provided by kerosene lamps. At the end of last year, Balefock received four solar panels to produce power, under a grant from the Rural Entrepreneurship Foundation.
On February 12, a young South African man was accidentally shot outside the Bafana Bafana spaza shop in Motherwell township in Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela Municipality. Police claim he was shot by Somali shopkeeper Hassan Alow. Alow said thieves who had robbed his shop shot the boy.
The ”dismal” state of housing delivery in the Eastern Cape needs national intervention, a public watchdog organisation said on Tuesday. Public Service Accountability Monitor researcher Chantelle de Nobrega said the province would not meet a nationally set target to eradicate informal settlements by 2014 without help.
Software giant Microsoft on Tuesday launched a stinging attack on Google, accusing its internet rival of riding roughshod over copyright in a rush to grab content for its own commercial benefit. The attack by top Microsoft lawyer Tom Rubin came as the two corporate titans step up their competition in both software and online content.
Some in the ruling African National Congress want to ensconce affirmative action as a permanent measure and thus enforce a new form of apartheid, the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) said on Tuesday. It wants the International Labour Organisation to pay urgent attention to its complaint, submitted last year, about affirmative action.