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/ 4 February 2005
President Thabo Mbeki has praised world leaders who were at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last month, for committing to be ”part of the generation that eliminates extreme poverty” in Africa and the world. Mbeki led a South African delegation that attended the meeting at the end of January.
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/ 4 February 2005
The Ugandan government said on Thursday that it has decided to halt its military operations against Lord’s Resistance Army rebels for 18 days on condition that they confine themselves to a designated area in the north as efforts to revive peace talks continue. The truce will take effect on Friday morning.
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/ 4 February 2005
A disgruntled Thai customer on Friday smashed up his allegedly defective Toyota pickup truck with a sledgehammer after failing to get the company to replace the offending vehicle with a deluxe Lexus sports car. Noraset Roonpraphan took a sledgehammer to his two-year-old Toyota Hilux Tiger pickup truck.
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/ 4 February 2005
Nigeria’s army quelled a demonstration at one of the country’s main oil-export terminals on Friday, said the platform’s operator, ChevronTexaco, and activists claimed two protesters were shot dead. Soldiers in the Escravos terminal opened fire on the demonstrators, killing two, said Helen Joe, a militant leader.
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/ 4 February 2005
Afghan and Nato forces launched a ground and air search on Friday for an Afghan passenger jet carrying 104 people after it disappeared from radar screens during a snowstorm near the mountain-ringed capital. The Kam Air Boeing 737-200 took off on Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat, bound for Kabul.
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/ 4 February 2005
Portions of South Africa’s media are failing in their role as watchdogs, and seem ”extremely reluctant to bark these days”, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Friday. He singled out the South African Broadcasting Corporation for particular criticism, calling it a ”virtual propaganda arm” of the African National Congress.
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/ 4 February 2005
<i>Life Sentence: A Biography of Herman Charles Bosman</i> is a 14-volume set restores to their most complete form the stories, novels, poems and occasional pieces that in Bosman’s lifetime and after his death were often published in less than perfect shape, writes Shaun de Waal.
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/ 4 February 2005
Ishtiyaq Shukri is the winner of the R25 000 inaugural European Union Literary Award for a first, unpublished novel by a South African writer. Here, <i>ZA@Play</i> provides the Q’s and he provides the A’s.
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/ 4 February 2005
Two armed men left a gun behind after robbing an adult store in Springs, east of Johannesburg, of DVDs, videos, magazines and cash on Wednesday, police said on Friday. Police spokesperson Inspector Thomlyn Jacobs said police found an unlicensed 9mm firearm loaded with live ammunition on a chair.
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/ 4 February 2005
Margaret Ashira, sitting in a tin-roofed shack in Africa’s largest slum, owes her survival to private charity groups who donate treatment. She believes her own government could do more to help her and other people living with Aids if it weren’t haemorrhaging money to pay the interest on its huge foreign debt.