Staff Reporter

Own Correspondent, Cape Town | Wednesday A DEFIANT Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has thrown down the gauntlet to “profiteering pharmaceutical companies” by smuggling a cut-price consignment of generic drugs into the country to treat HIV/Aids-related diseases, saying affordable drugs could save thousands of lives. TAC chairman Zackie Achmat said the group has imported 5000 Biozole […]

PEOPLE have taken to barricading themselves into their homes in fear of panthers in the remote northeast of Gabon. In two villages in Mekambo province, “people had taken to barricading themselves inside their houses” following attacks on domestic animals and livestock, the news agency AGP said. The panthers’ unusual conduct has “certain superstitious types believing […]

A NORTHWEST couple convicted of abusing and prostituting their three daughters for as little as R5 over a five-year period will be sentenced in the Pretoria Regional Court on October 30. The 41-year-old woman and the girls’ 31-year-old stepfather were convicted in August of abusing the 19-year-old and 16-year-old daughters, and of being party to […]

Gavin Pattison, Gulu, Uganda | Tuesday HEALTH officials in northern Uganda say they will use force if necessary to impose a quarantine on three districts at the centre of an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus – an incurable viral disease which liquefies victims’ internal organs and leads to death by bleeding in up to […]

THE water requirements of a rare, inch-long toad native to Tanzania’s southern highlands have prevented a hydro-electric plant in the area operating at full capacity, a local newspaper reported. The habitat of the Kihansi Spray Toad needs as much water, about seven cubic metres per second, as is used to generate 52 megawatts of electricity. […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Durban | Monday MASSIVE price increases of between 20 and 30% will price medical aids completely out of the market, spelling the end of private sector healthcare and ushering in a national health system which the already cash-strapped government would be hard pressed to implement, experts have warned. Jerry Bryant, the general manager […]

RAMPAGING herds of hippopotami have been spreading terror among farmers and fishermen along the river Niger, local authorities in the west African country of the same name said this week. The giant mammals, which can weigh up to four tonnes, have been attacking boatmen and impeding rice harvesting. Two hippos who were found to have […]

A DEPARTMENT of Correctional Services officer in New Hanover in KwaZulu-Natal, 24-year-old Ntutchuko Ngubane, has been discovered hanging from a tree in the veld near the town by farm labourers. Ngubane, who had been stationed at New Hanover prison for the past two years, “had behaved strangely” during his last shift, said a Prisons official: […]

EVARISTO CUMBANE, Maputo | Tuesday SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki has engineered a breakthrough in the conflict known as “Africa’s World War” by persuading five African leaders with armies embroiled in the Democratic Republic of Congo war to agree to pull their troops back. Mbeki, who mediated the one-day summit in Maputo, said the nations […]

POLICE are holding a cuckolded fifty-year-old Swazi who apparently hacked his wife and her lover to death with an axe over the weekend. The man, of Ka-Langa, a rural village in the rural Lubombo region, killed the couple after catching them having sex in his rival’s house on Saturday night. Finding the adulterous couple having […]

AFP and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday AIDS-related deaths in South Africa’s prisons increased by about 300% from 1995 to 1999, and are expected to continue to soar, an official with a prisons monitoring group said this week. Natural deaths in prisons had increased from 186 in 1995 to 737 in 1999, with about 90% […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Bloemfontein | Tuesday THE world is failing to feed those who need it most, with some 80 million children dying worldwide every year through malnutrition, says the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). And while the potential exists to produce enough food for everyone in the world, about 20% of people in […]

ANGOLA will sell 49% of its shares in the commerical branch of the national oil company Sonangol – the first time private investors are allowed to buy shares in Sonangol, which has been entirely state-owned since the company was created in 1976. Sonangol coordinates oil exploration and drilling by foreign companies within Angola, and its […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Monday THE former editor of Zimbabwe’s main state-controlled newspaper has admitted he suppressed stories that showed President Robert Mugabe’s government in a bad light in the run-up to parliamentary elections in June. “We went out of our way and abandoned all professional ethics as you know them,” former editor of the […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Durban | Monday AGGRIEVED staff at the KwaZulu-Natal Education and Culture department are to confront their MEC, Faith Gasa, after she branded them a “bunch of reptiles” and threatened to fire them for their part in an evil spell that her predecessor is alleged to have put on her. The nervous MEC is […]

THE European Union has awarded Zambia a $26m loan facility to help small and medium scale miners, Zambian Finance Minister Katele Kalumba said this week. The loan facility, to be managed by the European Investment Bank, will be available to five Zambian banks and leasing companies, Kalumba said after signing the agreement with the European […]

REBEL attacks in Guinea have killed 360 people since September and many more have been wounded, an official said here at the weekend. Interior Minister Moussa Solano said 15 attacks had been carried out by rebels, destroying hundreds of homes. The minister did not identify the aggressors, but said that they “are not only Guineans.” […]

REUTERS, AFP and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Monday SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki will chair a presidential summit in Mozambique to try to salvage a peace deal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – but even as regional leaders gathered in Maputo for Monday’s talks, fresh fighting erupted between the opposing parties in the […]

PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki has withdrawn from the public debate on the causes of Aids after admitting he had created confusion, but has not backed down from his controversial stance which questions the orthodox scientific view that HIV is the cause of Aids. Mbeki has sided with dissidents who claim other factors, including poverty and malnutrition, […]

MALAWI President Bakili Muluzi has hit back angrily at Britain’s tough remarks over a high-level corruption scandal in Malawi. Britain’s recent remarks come amid allegations that $2m in government contracts to build schools were wrongly awarded to Muluzi supporters, who in turn made campaign contributions for last year’s general elections. Muluzi said he was an […]

REUTERS, Johannesburg | Monday THE Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is considering demutualising as part of a major restructuring exercise to boost liquidity and improve the market’s efficiency. The JSE is the world’s 19th largest exchange, with market capitalisation of some $250bn, but it ranks 34th in liquidity terms. It will now implement further measures from […]

All the people aboard a Saudi plane hijacked to Baghdad were freed on the weekend and the hijackers taken away by Iraqi authorities. The passengers and crew streamed off the Saudi Arabian Airlines plane, hijacked on a Jeddah-London flight, a little over three hours after they landed at Baghdad’s Saddam International Airport. The four hijackers, […]

A NEWSPAPER founded just under a century ago by Mahatma Gandhi in Durban and dormant for 40 years has been relaunched. Gandhi established the “Indian Opinion” in 1903, using it to highlight the injustices of colonialism and white domination and promote his principles of non-violence, truth and welfare for all. Now called “Opinion,” the non-profit […]

ANNA BORZELLO and VINCENT MAYANJA, Kampala | Monday HEALTH authorities in northern Uganda are fighting frantically to curb the spread of the deadly Ebola virus, which has killed at least 33 people in a densely populated town of Gulu, but the government says there is “no cause for alarm.” In the past, outbreaks have hit […]

SOUTH Africa has lost six huge, bright orange fuel storage tanks, adrift on an iceberg “somewhere in the southern oceans,” Finance Minister Trevor Manuel told parliament this week. “The tanks, admittedly, were hard to lose,” he said. “Normally they sit on a huge ice-shelf, about 300m high, that projects from the edge of Antarctica into […]

MOZAMBIQUE’S former rebel leader Afonso Dhlakama said President Joaquim Chissano will be responsible for whatever happens should police attempt to disarm guards at his home. His statements come two days after Mozambique police in the central port city of Beira seized 18 firearms, ammunition and military radios in raids on the homes of several Renamo […]

A SOUTH African driver is facing charges in Namibia after his car-transporter nearly collided with a motorcade carrying presidents Eduardo dos Santos of Angola and Laurent Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Disaster for the two heads of state was narrowly averted when their 15-vehicle motorcade made way for Andries Nienaber, 45, from […]

EMSIE FERREIRA, Cape Town | Friday THE South African parliament has approved strict firearm controls which government says embodies South Africans’ indignation at rampant violent crime, but opposition says robs people of the right to self-defence. “Many a farmer’s wife will die, pistol in hand, under a shower of automatic fire,” charged General Constand Viljoen, […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT | Sunday THE Free State provincial government’s education ministry has joined its counterpart in the Northern Province and issued instructions to farmers to sign contracts that cede portions of their land away for educational purposes – or face expropriation, reports the Sunday Independent. The Free State Agricultural Union (FSAU) has endorsed the province’s […]

MEMBERS of the police’s bomb disposal unit have defused a bomb underneath a businessman’s car in the Cape Town suburb of Crawford. Police said the businessman went to a house to discuss a business deal, and when he left, spotted a suspicious object underneath his vehicle. The area was cordoned off as the bomb was […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, AFP | Saturday LAND mines have killed at least 100 people and injured 327 others in Angola during the first six months of the year, a UN report said this week. A total of 427 accidents involving land mines were documented in the report by the UN Office Charged with Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA). […]

Matthew Burbidge FOOD Woolworths, the home of the unblemished tomato, launched its stylish site www.inthebag.co.za last week and is betting its repu-tation that its tomatoes will arrive unbruised, slightly chilled and on time. Jessica Knight, CEO of inthebag, said while its client base is currently relatively small, its business model conservatively plans on having 300 […]