Staff Reporter

OWN CORRESPONDENT, United Nations | Friday CANADA has proposed that the UN Security Council create a team of experts to permanently monitor the sanctions regime applied against diamond and weapons smuggling that funds armed conflicts. The best way to ensure a follow-up of UN sanctions is “establishing a permanent office … to monitor the sanctions,” […]

Belinda Beresford At first hearing usually being sung by squeaky pre-pubescent voices The 12 Days of Christmas is a collection of nonsense phrases designed to test the memory. But like many nursery rhymes the song has a grimmer history. It was forged in the fires of the British Reformation, when the Church of England, created […]

Six years after the genocide, the killer children of Rwanda are going home. Maggie O’Kane visits the camp where they are being prepared for freedom At the foot of Misoko mountain, where mad, sad, gorilla-lover Dian Fossey lived out her life, stands the higher institute of agriculture and animal husbandry. Soon 10 buses will pull […]

SOME 28 million people are going hungry in sub-Saharan Africa because of drought and civil war, the UN food agency said in a report this week. The Food and Agriculture Organisation said in Eritrea, some 1.5 million people have been displaced by a two-year border war – now officially over – with Ethiopia, and they, […]

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 […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday APPROXIMATELY a fifth, or 16%, of South African graduates want to leave the country either permanently or only for a few years, a recently published Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) study has found, Die Burger newspaper reports. Only one third of the people, who are planning to go overseas, […]

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 […]

MORE than 200 Zimbabwean soldiers who fled into Zambia after a rebel offensive in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been repatriated, state media reported this week. Zambian General Timothy Kazembe, head of a Joint Military Commission set up to oversee a ceasefire in the DRC, said the Zimbabwean troops, who back the DRC […]

EVARISTO CUMBANE, Maputo | Thursday FORMER Mozambican rebel chief and now opposition leader Afonso Dhlakama finally recognised the government of President Joaquim Chissano late Wednesday, after seven hours of talks on the year-old electoral dispute. In a joint communique signed by the two men, Dhlakama for the first time referred to Chissano as the president […]

THE Norwegian Nobel Institute has invited all the living peace prize laureates, among whom are former South African presidents FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, to Oslo for its centenary celebrations in 2001, the newspaper Aftenposten reported this week. The institute marks the 100th awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2001, and around […]

MICHEL LECLERCQ, United Nations | Thursday A UN panel on Wednesday recommended a total embargo on diamonds coming from Liberia, accusing Monrovia of complicity in the diamond and arms trafficking that is sustaining the conflict in neighbouring Sierra Leone. The report by the five-member panel of experts appointed by UN chief Kofi Annan, concluded that […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday SOUTH African government delays in issuing a comprehensive policy framework on the liberalisation of the telecommunications market are hampering efforts by the industry’s regulator Icasa to restore investor confidence, Mandla Langa, the chairman of the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa), said this week. To this end, Icasa has moved […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday THE world’s largest gold producer has sold two mines in South Africa in a deal worth one billion rand, the SABC television station reported on Tuesday. AngloGold announced that it had sold the gold mines – Elandsrand and Deelkraal, situated west of Johannesburg – to a smaller rival, Harmony Gold […]

GRIFFIN SHEA, Harare | Thursday ZIMBABWEAN President Robert Mugabe downplayed his nation’s troubles on Wednesday in his state of the nation address to parliament, the first such speech he has ever given to an almost evenly split legislature. Mugabe noted that Zimbabwe’s economy “performed below expectations” in 2000, saying that the government expects to post […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Wednesday A TOTAL of 23291 workers in the formal business sector lost their jobs between June and September this year, Statistics SA reported this week. The shed jobs were out of a total figure of 4735052 employees, Annette Myburgh of Stats SA told reporters in Pretoria on Tuesday. The decline in […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday THE army captain who apparently used pictures of President Thabo Mbeki and other government leaders as shooting targets is the victim of a “smear campaign”, Beeld newspaper reports. The captain is innocent and a highly respected member of the National Defence Force, Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota told reporters on […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday SOUTH Africans have become slightly more positive about race relations since last year, but more whites have reported discrimination, according to a survey released this week. “An encouraging 44% of South Africans think that race relations have improved in the country since 1994,” the first year of black majority rule, […]

ILDA JACOBS, Washington | Tuesday A SOUTH African woman married to an African-American prisoner has embarked on a 40-day hunger strike in a bid to have him declassified as a gangster so that he will be given parole. Lara Johnson, 34, who was born in Volksrust in Mpumalanga, met Demian Johnson, 36, when he appealed […]

NIGERIA is the world’s 13th poorest country but six individual Nigerians rank among the world’s 100 richest people, press reports said this week. The reports, based on findings of a survey aired by the BBC on Monday, were splashed across the front pages of most newspapers. With a population of over 120 million people, Nigeria’s […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday SOUTH Africa is losing more than R23bn per year in direct and indirect income to the approximately 32 Asian, Italian, Nigerian and Russian crime syndicates currently established in the country, according to a crime report by the American CIA and FBI. Afrikaans daily newspaper Beeld said the report described South […]

NAMIBIAN President Sam Nujoma made the national army band replay the national anthem at a parade because it was too slow, The Namibian newspaper reported. They were playing at a passing-out parade for national youth service recruits at the Walvis Base military base. “I don’t know why everyone plays our anthem so slowly, even internationally,” […]

THE South African National Parks board is conducting a public opinion poll on the use of cellphones in its reserves. SANP head of environmental services Murray Macgregor said the law on environmental impact assessments required that the establishment of a cellular network within a national park be investigated. The Kruger National Park has cellular coverage […]

SAM AOLA-OOKO, Mombasa | Tuesday CAMPAIGNERS in Kenya have come up with an ingenious new weapon in the fight against HIV and Aids: the minibus. Across Africa, minibuses are the most popular form of public transport, especially in towns and cities. In Kenya, where they are called matatu, or threes, because a ride once cost […]

LIFESAVERS aboard a rescue helicopter saved four children who were drowning off South Africa’s eastern coast within half an hour on Monday. An official said the helicopter crew spotted a boy of 12 in distress in the Indian Ocean at about 1:00 pm. Less than half-an-hour later the helicopter spotted three children, aged about 13 […]

MOZAMBIQUE’S economic growth, which had averaged 10% annually prior to devastating floods early in 2000, will suffer from the disaster for another year, a government minister said this week. The southern African country saw all efforts made since 1992 – after a 16-year civil war – washed away at the beginning of this year by […]

ERITREA said this week that it looked foward to a “future of peace and hope” with Ethiopia after both countries formally ended more than two years of war. On December 12 in Algiers, Eritrean President Issaias Afeworki and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi signed a comprehensive peace accord to end a conflict that erupted on […]

KWAZULU-Natal provincial traffic chief John Schnell says weather and traffic volumes have played a major role in South Africa’s holiday death toll, which had reached 373 by Monday night – but warned that most head-on collisions and rear-endings were preceded by a traffic law violation. The Arrive Alive centre in Pretoria said speed, drinking and […]

AN impoverished rural school in Mpumalanga benefited to the tune of R250 000 when a Canadian man gave his wife, a former schoolteacher, an unusual birthday present. Ray Menard and his wife, Christine, handed over two new classrooms, a storeroom and three revamped classrooms to Lepesi Primary School in Luphisi tribal village, about 60km east […]