Staff Reporter

All border-crossing passages between Israel and the Gaza Strip will remain closed until further notice, the Israeli defence ministry said Friday, hours after six Israeli civilians were killed in a militant attack at one such crossing. Karni, in the Gaza Strip, was closed immediately after an overnight attack perpetrated by three Palestinian gunmen.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-InternationalNews&ao=177898">Deadly Gaza bombing</a>

Banking group Absa was the most-reported-on company in leading South African media in 2004, according to research conducted by Media Tenor South Africa. Absa was followed by telecommunications group Telkom and gold miner Harmony. For the first time in five years, black CEOs topped the list of most-quoted managers in the media.

Tamil rebels have been recruiting children from tsunami relief camps, the head of Unicef in Sri Lanka said on Thursday. Although the government and the separatists have been working together in relative peace during the relief efforts, Ted Chaiban, of the United Nations children’s fund, said there were three "verified cases of child recruitment" involving the Tamil Tigers.

The painstaking process of matching corpses to the names of more than 3 000 people still missing since the tsunami struck Thailand has been disrupted by a turf war between the police and the government’s forensic team.

Tantalising indications of the extent of the intervention by Cabinet ministers in the drafting of the final report of the investigation into the arms deal have emerged. The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> has found handwritten notes regarding a meeting between the auditor general, President Thabo Mbeki and ministers Alec Erwin, Trevor Manuel and Mosiuoa Lekota

The irony with the African National Congress statement on the judiciary is that the party is now finding fault with the very system it introduced — a system flowing from the Freedom Charter. Last week’s comments by the ruling party were made in the context of an extensive discussion on the charter.

Hong Kong police are searching for a man who handed out HK$1&nbsp;000 (R753) notes to passers-by on a busy street, a spokesperson said Thursday. The man, soberly dressed and in his forties, is known to have handed out at least HK$7&nbsp;000 in the city’s crowded Mongkok district, but officers believe he gave over more.

Indonesia on Wednesday began restricting the movements of the 2 000 foreigners helping the tsunami relief operation in Aceh, ordering aid groups and journalists to register, seek permission before leaving the province’s two main towns, and only travel with a military escort.

As Maria Ramos completes her first year as Transnet chief executive she is becoming bolder, undertaking an often ruthless set of cost-cutting and repositioning exercises at this most important and difficult of parastatals. As her axe is sharpened and vested interests feel its cut, the lobby to throw momma from the train is growing louder.

South African rescue workers said on Wednesday they have never before witnessed such devastation as they saw while performing relief work in Indonesia. Six Global Relief workers arrived back in South Africa from Indonesia on Wednesday. The organisation’s chief executive, Murray Louw, said the devastation the December 26 tsunami had caused was overwhelming.

The king and the queen of an endangered aboriginal tribe vowed on Wednesday to rebuild their jungle kingdom on an isolated Indian island that was smashed by the Indian Ocean tsunamis. The 62-year-old king and his queen shepherded their subjects to safety as the giant waves crashed ashore.

Egyptian television dramas will soon be subject to review by a panel of religious censors, sparking outcry by authors who say the move is a threat to their creative freedom and livelihoods. Information Minister Mamduh al-Beltagi said only shows that are "responsible" and "respect the values and traditions of Egyptian society" will be allowed on air.

The upgrade of South Africa’s country ceilings for foreign currency debt and bank deposits to Baa1 from Baa2 by international agency Moody’s Investors Service was a resounding acknowledgment that South Africa has got its policy mix right, says Colen Garrow, an economist at Brait.

Standing amid the ruins, Suwandi reflected on what had happened to his old workplace — a giant cement factory next to the sea. "I’m very sad. I don’t have a job any more. We lost all our money in here," he explained, pointing at his office, now a mangled heap of metal and oversized tubing.

There’s a lot of disinformation that is deliberately being spread around at the moment. Every whisper suggesting that the Asian tsunami was not natural, or was due to something other than an earthquake, is being systematically debunked quite thoroughly in the mass media. Ian Fraser offers up everything you need to know about the Asian tsunami — because if it’s online, it must be true.

A comprehensive peace deal between the government of Sudan and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army on January 9 capped a year of slow but steady progress in efforts to end the 21-year-old civil war in southern Sudan.

Plastic bottles could provide the cheapest and most practical way of preventing water-borne diseases in regions affected by the recent tsunami, say Swiss scientists. Solar water disinfection, or Sodis, relies on radiation and heat from the sun to kill most bacteria and viruses in the water

Six Iraqi police officers were killed in a car bomb blast in Tikrit on Tuesday, the latest deadly strike against security forces with elections less than three weeks away. Meanwhile, United States President George Bush said he is working to ensure the elections go forward as planned, but warned the vote is only a "first step" towards a permanent government.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-InternationalNews&ao=177692">Fallujah ‘a city of ghosts'</a>

Wrapped in a bundle of warm blankets and lucky to be alive, four-month-old Thomas Bekele still faces a precarious future. Orphaned three weeks ago when his mother died from tuberculosis, he is one of the almost five million orphans in Ethiopia — a mushrooming crisis that the government warned was "tearing apart the social fabric" of the country. The rising number of orphans has, however, raised the demand for adoptions to a record high.