Staff Reporter

At least 120 people, most of them fighters in the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, have been killed in northern Uganda in the past fortnight, the army said on Thursday.

In what it calls a world first, South Africa’s biggest retail bank, Absa, on Wednesday launched a portable device that enables the bank’s staff or agents to capture accounts, issue debit cards and select PINs in areas where people have limited access to a physical bank branch.

President Thabo Mbeki is to lead the South African delegation to the Southern African Development Community Heads of State and Government Summit in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, which kicks off on August 25.

It’s official. The SoBig.F internet worm is the fastest spreading e-mail plague of all time. MessageLabs, a company that filters e-mail for corporate clients around the world, says it intercepted more than a million copies of the virus in one day.

We cannot say that the remarkable temperatures in Europe last week or the drought in Southern Africa this winter are the result of global warming. What we can say is that they correspond to the predictions made by climate scientists. Humans are relentlessly destroying conditions for life on Earth.

The panel of judges for the Greening the Future 2003 Awards consisted of specialists in the fields of sustainable development and corporate environmental investment. They are…

As Auditor General Shauket Fakie defended the final report of the arms deal investigation before Parliament on Wednesday, a new allegation emerged of irregularities in the awarding of subcontracts.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=19307">Fakie: No changes made to arms report</a>

Cleric Allan Boesak says that if he had taken the stand in his own defence in his year 2000 trial, Archbishop Desmond Tutu could also have ended up facing criminal charges.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=19316">Boesak feels ‘ignored and discarded'</a>

Thousands of Bushmen have been forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana. Reasons given for the evictions have included the Bushmen’s "development", and conservation of the area, but diamond mining companies are being blamed.

Different perspectives: Member of the Knesset Roman Bronfman and Israel Harel, founder of the Council of Jewish Settlements of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, debate Israel’s options on the West Bank and Gaza.

Financial markets delivered a much improved verdict on the prospects for the global economy last week, while key economic research noted a fundamental shift in investor attitudes towards emerging markets.

South Africa is a water-scarce country, but there is plenty of sun. A group of University of Stellenbosch researchers has effectively used solar energy to produce drinkable water in isolated rural communities – cheaply, reliably and with very low maintenance.

South African supermarket group Shoprite believes Africa is a viable growth opportunity and will be opening four new stores in Angola and five in Ghana during the next year.

Judging from the occasional glimpses I’ve had of the adverts on TV whenever I’ve bothered looking in that direction, it would appear to be the crass commercial scam period known loosely as ‘Christmas’ – a time of being manipulated into buying crap you don’t need, under the guise of goodwill to all.

Despite what the brain dead moron who was supposedly a teacher may have inculcated in you — history is a fascinating field of study. Often the last thing any political system wants is for people to have a clear idea of how they happen to be where they are.

A drawback to daily news is that it rarely allows for any kind of in-depth overview to emerge. And there’s a tendency in the media to simply ‘report’ and rarely explain. So here’s a glimpse of a world that needs a vigorous scrubbing with a wirebrush and Detol.

The navy is champing at the bit to make good on Mbeki’s promise to send troops to Liberia. Military experts, however, say SA is at full stretch, or even overextended, with its military commitments to peacekeeping in Burundi and the DRC.

It is surprising that the proposed amendments to the Skills Development Act have elicited almost no public debate, despite the harsh criticism levelled at the sector education and training authorities (Setas) over the past year.

Six leading Algerian dailies were suspended from publication on Monday for not paying debts to state-run printing presses, the newspapers said. Their editors said a sudden call to pay the debts was part of a government move to stifle press freedom.

South African and Mozambican police have seized 30 luxury vehicles worth an estimated R5,5-million. Intelligence on the theft of vehicles in South Africa led authorities to a warehouse in Mozambique where the vehicles were kept for distribution.

Kirby discovers that he is not alone in his plea for commentator-free televised sports games, and defends his stance regarding the Bristow-Bovey saga following a scathing rebuttal from <i>The Sunday Independent</i>’s Jeremy ‘Karen Bliksem’ Gordin.