Staff Reporter

A TEENAGE girl who has just given birth in northern Nigeria now faces 180 lashes on conviction of premarital sex by an Islamic court in Zamfara state. Bariya Ibrahim Magazu, 17, was sentenced to be flogged by a court at Isafe in September, but the punishment was not to be carried out until at least […]

TWENTY THREE Somalian boat people died from thirst and hunger in a boat stranded off the coast of Yemen where they had sought refuge, a UN refugee official said. The Somalians had spent 12 days at sea when their boat broke down in the Gulf of Aden. The Yemeni coast guard was able to save […]

TWO Namibian nationals claim that Angolan UNITA rebels abducted and tortured them and seven other villagers, killing three, a human rights organisation said. Daniel Ndeluudila, 54, and Simeon Hamulo, 23, told the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) that they and the other villagers were abducted on December 25 in northeast Namibia and taken across […]

A DEUTSCHE Telekom-led consortium has concluded a $120m deal to buy a 35% stake in Tanzania’s state-owned telephone monopoly and take over management control, a government representative said this week. Detecon, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, along with Dutch group Mobile Systems International Cellular will pay the amount directly to the Tanzania Telecommunication Company in […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, San Francisco | Sunday WHEN analysts and other observers of the Internet industry look ahead to 2001, they see nothing but pain. And like a canary in a coal mine, San Francisco, the epicentre of the Internet boom, is starting to show real signs that the dot-com craze is running out of air. […]

LIBYAN leader Muammar Gaddafi has once again distanced himself from terrorism in an interview to be published by the German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. Libya under Gaddafi has been widely accused of backing and organising terrorist attacks. Gaddafi said new possibilities to resolve conflicts by democracy, in hotspots such as Nicaragua and Northern Ireland, meant […]

THE UN Security Council has urged Rwanda and Uganda to halt military offensives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and to withdraw their forces from that country. But it stopped well short of reacting to a call from the government of DRC to slap an arms embargo and other sanctions on Rwanda and Uganda, […]

SOUTHERN African foreign ministers are meeting in Pretoria to discuss a constitutional crisis in the Comoros. Also attending the meeting will be ministers from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) troika – Algeria, Togo and Zambia – and OAU Secretary General Salim Ahmed Salim. The three-island republic between Madagascar and east Africa was plunged into […]

GINA DOGGETT, Accra | Saturday GHANAIAN voters have opted to turn their backs on the past, electing opposition leader John Kufuor to succeed longtime ruler Jerry Rawlings in the country’s first democratic transfer of power. Rawlings’ protege John Atta Mills, the incumbent vice president, conceded defeat as near-final results showed Kufuor with an unassailable 15% […]

GAMBIA’S President Yaya Jammeh has announced that his government plans to introduce Islamic Sharia law from next year. Jammeh, who was born into a Catholic family and converted to Islam in the mid-80s, promised however to guarantee that religious freedom would be respected. He has been in power since 1994 in this small west African […]

ANGOLAN President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has confirmed that new elections will be held in his war-torn country some time in the second half of 2002. The last and only elections to date in the country were held in 1992. In that poll, Dos Santos’ MPLA won a majority of seats in parliament, which it […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Washington | Saturday US officials and authorities in the states of Ohio and Kentucky have mounted a massive search for a Cameroonian teenager who mysteriously disappeared last week near the end of a bizarre odyssey to be reunited with his mother. “We have no idea whatsoever where he is or what happened to […]

NIGERIA’S President Olusegun Obasanjo has admitted that governing Africa’s most populous country has been rough. The elected civilian Obasanjo came to power in May last year, ending more than 15 years of military rule. This week the retired general and a former military ruler himself told reporters governance had not been easy. “God is in […]

ANOTHER four people have died of cholera in South Africa, bringing to 50 the death toll since the outbreak of the epidemic in mid-August, health officials said this week. A total of 9 824 cases of cholera, including 264 at the weekend, have been diagnosed in KwaZulu. The latest victims were two girls aged six […]

FORMER senior Malawian cabinet minister Brown Mpinganjira, sacked last month by President Bakili Muluzi, has been arrested on corruption charges after allegedly authorising payments to “ghost contractors” when he was education minister several years ago. Mpinganjira, 50, was widely tipped to succeed Muluzi as leader of the governing United Democratic Front (UDF), but was abruptly […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Luanda | Thursday THE Angolan government has vehemently denied that the country’s official diamond trader has been buying gems from the rebel Unita movement, which is at war with the regime. A Portuguese daily claimed that the Angola Selling Corporation (ASCORP) has been trafficking in diamonds bought from traders supporting the rebels. “It […]

ABOUt 30 people are feared dead after a bus plunged into the River Nile in central Uganda. Police said the bus was travelling from the northwestern district of Arua to Kampala when the accident happened. A rescue team, including several divers, was flown to the scene. Most of the passengers were residents of Kampala returning […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday AFRICAN diamond producer Namibian Minerals Company (Namco) says South Africa’s latest development in underwater diamond technology, the MV Ya Toivo, has proved “extremely” successful in recovering the precious stone off the Namibian coast. Designed by Namco’s engineers and built in South Africa, the R42m diamond mining ship set sail […]

HUNDREDS of women in the northern Nigerian city of Kano were expected to spend the next few days in detention after a crackdown ordered by religious officials, police said Sunday. A policemen in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, confirmed that more than 200 women had been arrested in the past week after being […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kiev | Thursday UKRANIAN authorities have refused to comment on the sale of a pontoon bridge which is at the centre of a major corruption scandal involving the president of the island nation of Madagascar. Senior Madagascan MP Jean-Eugene Voninahitsy was this week jailed for 11 months after he claimed that President Didier […]

SUSPECTED Muslim fundamentalists clad in military uniforms slit the throat of a young Algerian cabaret singer and kidnapped six people from a discotheque where she was performing, the press reported. The singer known as Sihem, 24, was thrown to the ground by two of the attackers who on Friday stormed the nightclub at Berrahal, where […]

Neal Collins soccer So here it is, this is Christmas; everybody’s grabbing points. The festive season is when the overpaid, overpampered (and in David Ginola’s case, not-quite-overweight) English Premiership footballers finally get to earn their living the hard way. Though currently the bookmakers are making odds for the warmest Christmas on record rather than the […]

After serving a six-month ban for his part in the match-fixing scandal, the talented Western Province batsman is again available for selection for the South African Test team Peter Robinson So what about Herschelle Gibbs, then? Should the South African selectors welcome him back with open arms and rush him into the side for the […]

Greed and corruption too often drove athletic achievement off the sports pages Gavin Evans Sport’s first year of the third millennium (or the last of the second) will be remembered as hugely significant in so many ways here good, there bad, but mostly merely ugly. Let’s start with the good, because it was indeed far […]

His achievements were modest, but voters would have given Clinton a third term if the law had allowed it Martin Kettle As the British and the Irish were able to see for themselves during his recent lap of honour visit to Northern Ireland, Bill Clinton has always been acutely aware of himself as a figure […]

Nicolas Guilhot For 50 years the World Bank has been the arbiter of development. Its annually published World Development Report defines the priorities, the jargon and the issues that shape and express the concept of development. From the reduction of poverty so close to the heart of Robert McNamara (bank president from 1968 to 1981), […]

Riaan Wolmarans It’s not easy to ask an attractive waiter for a Screaming Orgasm or Sex on the Beach while keeping a straight face especially not after you’ve already had a few of either. But you’ll just get a stoical stare before you’re served a big multicoloured concoction with various straws, fruits and an umbrella […]

The purpose of this text is to fuel the debate between right-wing and left-wing intellectuals. It does not attempt to explain the relation of either to governments or changes in society Subcommandante Marcos I. Pay-per-view global domination We learned at school that the world is not square; but at the start of the third millennium […]

Race has been a major issue in 2000 it was a theme of President Thabo Mbeki’s speech at the opening of Parliament; the Human Rights Commission investigated race in the media and organised a conference on racism in South Africa. The politicians and the academics have been heard and read on the subject throughout the […]

friday december 22 Cricket: Tour match, second day, KwaZulu-Natal vs Sri Lanka at 10am on SuperSport1 (SS1)/CSN; Standard Bank Cup, Boland vs Griqualand West, from Paarl, at 3.45pm on SS2 (from 6pm also on SS1/CSN) Soccer: English Nationwide second division, Bristol City vs Bristol Rovers at 9.45pm on SuperSport International (SSInt) saturday december 23 Cricket: […]

THE World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on Thursday announced a debt reduction package for Malawi that when fully implemented would make the African nation eligible for relief worth one billion dollars. The relief envisioned for Malawi is worth $643m in present value terms, according to a Bank-IMF statement, which added that over the […]

Anew generation of young black writers has failed to emerge in the post-apartheid era, writes Shaun de Waal As literary editor of this paper, I have grown very tired of hearing the question inevitably posed by visiting foreign journalists trawling for information about South African literature: Where are the new young black writers? There seemed […]