OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Sunday 4.45pm ARMED war veterans invaded more white-owned farms in Zimbabwe at the weekend after President Robert Mugabe gave them the go-ahead, a farming leader said on Sunday. “It’s continuing to escalate,” Commercial Farmers’ Union president Tim Henwood said. More than 400 farms have been invaded in the past couple of […]
SARAH BULLEN, Cape Town | Friday 7.45pm THE University of the Witwatersrand on Friday fired Professor Werner Bezwoda for misrepresenting the results of a clinical trial for breast cancer treatment. The trials were conducted on more than 100 indigent black women without their formal consent. Bezwoda was also found guilty because he failed to obtain […]
SWAZI MPs have demanded to know why the State-owned Observer newspaper was closed down three weeks ago. The Observer was closed on February 17 by owners Tibiyo Taka Ngwane after a series of skirmishes with editorial staff. Tibiyo owns the paper on behalf of the Swazi nation, and are strong traditional loyalists. MP Mfomfo Nkambule, […]
SOUTH Africa has agreed to send firefighters to help combat forest fires which have been ravaging tracts of southern Ethiopia for the past 27 days. More than 50000 hectares have been totally destroyed by the fires, which are burning in the Borena and Bale areas, endangering rare wild animals as well as local flora. South […]
KENYAN police on Friday denied that 4,8 tons of hashish they seized in the port city of Mombasa in January has disappeared from a police store. “This not true. The seized drugs are safely in police hands and elaborate arrangements for their security have been put in place to ensure maximum security,” said a statement […]
SIXTEEN members and supporters of People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) on Friday suspended their five-day hunger strike after the SA Prisoners Organisation for Human Rights intervened. The five, currently in Pollsmor Prison, went on hungerstrike on Monday after prison authorities failed some of their demands.
US President Bill Clinton has said that Amadou Diallo, the African immigrant whose shooting death by police stirred turmoil in New York, might not have been shot if he had been a white man in a white neighbourhood. Clinton talked about the Diallo case during a White House meeting of more than 150 religious leaders […]
Khadija Magardie The leading United States television news network, ABC, has drafted advertisements for the South African press seeking patients who were part of Dr Werner Bezwoda’s discredited clinical trials into breast cancer treatment. The advert calls on women who were part of Bezwoda’s breast cancer trials at Johannesburg hospital to come forward to tell […]
Aid workers in Sierra Leone are striving to rehabilitate the country’s child soldiers Victoria Brittain Three hundred children spill out across the dusty courtyard, playing ball with homemade bundles, wrestling, running, exuberant. A month ago they were child soldiers with guns and ammunition deep in the bush of Sierra Leone, often wreaking havoc in their […]
They may have only appeared once, but these characters made quite an impression: Poochie: Ill-fated canine addition to The Itchy and Scratchy Show, renowned for habitually “getting biz-zay”. Rabbi Krustofski (pictured below): Estranged father of Krusty the Clown; co- host of radio talk show Gabbin’ about God. God: Briefly endorses Homer’s new religion – based […]
Gregory Mthembu-Salter Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma concluded a four day visit to Burundi on Monday, rounding off a remarkable two weeks of intense South African involvement in efforts to stop this tiny Central African nation’s long-running civil war. The week before Dlamini-Zuma’s visit, former president Nelson Mandela had been in action in Arusha, […]
REUSABLE needles used for a national treatment campaign in Egypt decades ago are the cause of the high number of liver disease cases in the country today, researchers said. hundreds of thousands of Egyptians received injections for a common but serious disease called schistosomiasis, which is caused by a parasite in the blood, from the […]
Neil Manthorp Planning was something that South Africa’s cricket teams weren’t able to do in the past because they had no experience of what they were planning for. It was like packing for a weekend trip to the moon – should you take sandwiches? Does it get cold in the evenings? This time, with three […]
Peter Dickson Still weary from flood relief and mercy missions in Mozambique, South African Air Force (SAAF) helicopter pilots were this week plucking stranded victims from raging river waters in southern KwaZulu- Natal and northern Transkei. Pilots of the SAAF’s Durban-based 15 Squadron rescued 13 pupils and teachers from Riverside Primary in Port Saint John’s […]
Rural women are likely to be the losers under the agriculture ministry’s new policy aimed at creating a class of black commercial farmers Samuel Kariuki The South African land reform programme has the potential of consolidating and expanding South Africa’s fragile democratic gains. But this process also has the devastating potential of fragmenting the vision […]
Robert Kirby CHANNELVISION Can there have been a more gratifying triumph than that of Nando’s over the humourless prissmongers who succeeded in having the now famous guide-dog television commercial canned? God save me from ever praising an advertising outfit, but to Hunt Lascaris I bow my head in honour, especially for the way they came […]
KAIZER Chiefs deadlocked 1-1 with Jomo Cosmos in their PSL match at the Johannesburg Stadium on Wednesday night. Cosmos’ Mozambican star Manuel “Tico Tico” Bucuane played a stunning game and was the catalyst for a wonderful equaliser in the 71st minute. Chiefs drew first blood in the 42nd minute when Siyabonga Nomvete scored from the […]
Chris McGreal The first sign of life from one of the trees speckled across the vast new lake that is southern Mozambique was an arm thrust from among the leaves. The anonymous limb waved a cooking pot, not with any great vigour, for fear of upsetting the precarious balance of life under the foliage. But […]
Thebe Mabanga The stature of South African musicians is set to be drastically improved. This is if the recommendations of the Music Industry Task Team (Mitt) are successfully implemented. The recommendations are contained in a draft report that has been prepared after a week-long seating for Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Ben Ngubane. […]
floods David Le Page A University of Zululand researcher publicly predicted the dramatic flooding in the Northern Province and Mozambique, but his warnings went unheeded by authorities, particularly dam managers. According to a report published this week by British magazine New Scientist, Mark Jury made his predictions as long ago as September. Jury is currently […]
Barbara Ludman LIFESTYLE Like most beautiful things, berries often promise more than they deliver. In its natural state, a raspberry is an illusion, a wisp of a taste somewhere just past the edge of the senses. Blueberries look bluer than they taste; mulberries aren’t worth the trouble of keeping the juice off your shirt; and […]
AUTHORITIES in Cameroon have questioned three radio station workers over a broadcast which allegedly criticised the country’s human rights record, leaked security service reports say. The reports said the three were questioned over a broadcast entitled “Refugees in France and Britain” which included interviews with English-speaking separatists living abroad who accused President Paul Biya’s government […]
Connie Selebogo Three Senegalese art traders, who claim they were assaulted at the Cradock street market in Rosebank last month by bogus policemen, are due in court next week – not as witnesses but as suspects. The traders, who are being tried on assault charges lodged by their alleged attackers, say the police initially opposed […]
Barry Streek The accrued backlog for the upgrading, maintenance and repair of South Africa’s national roads, excluding provincial and district roads, was estimated at R3- billion at the start of the 1999/2000 financial year, Minister of Transport Dullah Omar has revealed. However, only R775-million was allocated in the 1999/2000 financial year by the Department of […]
Tanzania’s vast plains are home to the world’s most dangerous and most beautiful beasts Stephen Pritchard Africa is a vast gymnasium for the senses. Sight, hearing and smell are given a punishing workout; tired, urban eyes become sharper, ears more alert and noses are offered new, stimulating aromas. Driving across huge landscapes in search of […]
Rupert Neethling Reverse engineering is a digital hot potato. Geeks love it because it lets them study how programming code is put together. Movie moguls hate it because the geeks went and cracked the code that keeps customers from playing Digital Video Discs wherever and on whatever platform they want. The final straw came when […]
BAFANA Bafana will meet Mauritius on April 29, instead og April 1, in a Castle Cup Southern Africa championship first-round match. The match has been rescheduled due to date clashes with first-round, second-leg matches in the African Champions League, Cup Winners Cup and CAF Cup.
Mark Atkinson SHAREWORLD Nick Leeson may have been a brash, high-risk gambler prepared to bet Barings Bank on a rise in the Japanese stock market but, on the whole, London traders are a shy and conservative breed, according to new research published this week. Based on in-depth interviews with the London staff of four of […]
How 007 could send an unbreakable coded message to Moonraker Michael Brooks In New Mexico the light can be truly astonishing. Not because it gives the desert a strange aesthetic beauty, but because it contains coded messages. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory announced recently that they have written data into single photons, the […]
over patients’ Mxolisi ka-Mankazana South Africa is failing in its fight against HIV/Aids at a time when other countries that have less economic, political and scientific clout than we do, such as Uganda and Tanzania, are gaining ground against it. This is despite the appointment by the previous health minister of a special director to […]
John Patterson It’s a little disconcerting. In front of me is a mother of two in her mid-30s, well dressed with a blonde, bobbed hairdo. She looks like an archetypal soccer mom from the wealthy suburbs, probably drives a Ford Explorer, active in the parent/teachers association, gladly volunteers to help out at the school bake […]
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has accused ex-rebel leader Foday Sankoh of hampering peace in Sierra Leone. Annan, in a report to the Security Council, said Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front (RUF), although now part of the government, were hostile to U.N. peacekeepers and contributed to rising tensions in the tiny Western African nation.