Staff Reporter

Sudan’s humanitarian and development needs will reach a whopping $1,8-billion in 2007, by far the largest share of the global funds demanded by United Nations chief Kofi Annan, the UN said Tuesday. "Sudan will require more than $1,8-billion to fund humanitarian, recovery and development projects in 2007," said a UN press release.

The divergent experiences of two United States military units in the first year of the invasion of Iraq hold lessons for countering terrorism in Africa. In 2003, the northern city of Mosul had all the ingredients for a potential insurgency: it was home to the Iraqi Islamic Party as well as to more than 100 000 disbanded and unemployed former Iraqi army soldiers and sympathetic Kurdish militias.

A casual visitor to the drab committee room in the British Parliament building where the fate of General Augusto Pinochet was decided during five weeks in 1998 and 1999 might have been excused for missing the case’s historical significance. The law lords in business suits sat in front of robed and wigged barristers.

Her name is Unity Dow, Judge Unity Dow. But she may remind some of Portia — Shylock’s nemesis — for the performance she put on last week for the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Last Wednesday, Botswana’s Bushmen won a historic victory at the end of a four-year legal battle to hold on to their ancestral lands.

The White House was on Friday considering an even deeper military commitment in Iraq, with a short-term deployment of 20 000 extra forces to Baghdad, a day after the United States army chief warned that the force could break under the strain of the war.

For a brief moment on Wednesday night it appeared that Belgium had disappeared. The main French-language television station hoodwinked the country into thinking that it had split in two when it reported that Flanders had issued a unilateral declaration of independence.

Hundreds of civilians were reported to be fleeing their homes in central Somalia on Thursday as the prospect of a war between Islamist militants and government forces, backed by Ethiopian troops and artillery, appeared to draw closer. The exodus was under way in the area around Baidoa.

The price of uranium has quietly, in a behind-the-scenes kind of way, soared elevenfold since 2000, having reached $63 a pound from about $7 previously, according to uranium industry watchers UX Consulting. Analysts believe it could reach $70 a pound next year. The metal is not traded on the open market and only spot prices are available.

The Basilica San Paolo, also known as St Paul’s Outside the Walls, slumbers in marble splendour in an attractively shabby southern suburb of Rome. Graffiti-illuminated trains rattle and roar past its imposing cloister walls, and elderly harpies in heels goad tiny, furry martyrs resentful motion across the wide common at its rear that runs down towards the Tiber.

The commercial precinct in Rosebank, Johannesburg, is set for a major boost. Construction of a R623-million mixed-use development comprising retail space, a 160-room hotel, a four-level basement parking garage and loft offices is set to begin early in 2007.

A band of gunmen wearing military uniforms descended on a commercial street in the centre of Baghdad on Thursday and kidnapped dozens of merchants in a brazen daylight raid. Witnesses and security officials said about 100 gunmen wearing military uniforms and driving about 20 silver sports utility vehicles grabbed between 40 and 50 people.

Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Gideon Gono is expected to introduce a long-promised new currency next month for the economically troubled Southern African nation, banking industry sources said. The Zimbabwe dollar is shedding more value at the moment than any other currency in the world.

Zimbabwean lawyers, human rights and pro-democracy activists on Wednesday marched across Harare protesting against increasing human rights violations and the use of torture by state security agents. The protesters, numbering more than a 100 people and who demanded urgent action to end human rights abuses and torture, handed a petition to the Supreme Court.