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/ 5 February 2005
The Mail & Guardian is not alone in admiring Archbishop Desmond Tutu (”Some amongst us admire the Arch”). There are many in the African National Congress who admire him too. As an organisation, the ANC has often paid tribute to his contribution to the struggle for democracy in South Africa and to his continued importance to our national life, writes Smuts Ngonyama.
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/ 5 February 2005
”President Thabo Mbeki, allow me to address you in an open letter. Despite my growing animosity towards your personal philosophies, I have been able to handle almost everything you have said and written as president. Until you (or one of your cronies) claimed, on the African National Congress website, that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is the icon of white people,” writes Koos Kombuis.
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/ 5 February 2005
What irony that popular worldview (”Spread the truth, not the word”), which, scorning those holding on to traditional religion, denounces any form of ”truth”, yet with increasing hunger searches for real meaning. Cries for tolerance are directed at the religious, yet frequently come in the form of intolerance, often stemming from those proudly professing to hold no religious beliefs.
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/ 5 February 2005
The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) secretariat could be relocated from South Africa to Ethiopia by the end of the year as part of a strategy to accelerate its integration into African Union structures, a move widely criticised by political commentators who fear that the continent’s recovery plan will be subsumed into AU bureaucracy.
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/ 5 February 2005
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, are to hold their first summit this week in Egypt, the highest-level talks between the two sides for more than four years. There is growing international pressure to secure a comprehensive ceasefire by Palestinian armed groups and an Israeli commitment to curtail its attacks.
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/ 4 February 2005
Midfielder Claude Makelele made a controversial exit from Real Madrid 18 months ago — now he is the key man in a Chelsea team threatening to become the best in Europe. It has taken many months for Florentino Perez, the Real president, even to hint that taking the oil out of his magnificent machine might not have been his wisest decision.
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/ 4 February 2005
The South African Council of Churches (SACC) has expressed shock and dismay at continuing assertions that condoms ”don’t work” as a means of preventing the spread of HIV. Secretary general Molefe Tsele said the SACC believes that all credible scientific studies conclude that the virus that causes Aids cannot pass through a latex condom.
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/ 4 February 2005
South Africa’s largest union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), and its counterpart, the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), have threatened demonstrations including blockades of all borders to Zimbabwe. This comes after the leaders of Cosatu and the ZCTU met on Thursday in South Africa.
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/ 4 February 2005
As Central African leaders meet in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville, this weekend to discuss threats to the region’s vast forests, the size of the world’s ”second lung” keeps diminishing at an alarming speed. The WWF says that if the deforestation continues at the present pace, two-thirds of the forests may disappear in less than 50 years.
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/ 4 February 2005
South Africa’s Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, accused the European Union on Friday of keeping African farmers poor. He also questioned the moral leadership of the United States as he backed a British-led initiative to boost aid for Africa, for which plans are being discussed at Group of Seven talks in London.