Staff Reporter

Harare | Tuesday THOUSANDS of people living in southern Zimbabwe are facing starvation as critical food shortages loom, aid agencies and officials said this week. The food crisis in southern Zimbabwe has been blamed on a variety of factors, including a devastating cyclone in early 2000, a January drought which destroyed this year’s maize crops, […]

MICHEL SAILHAN, Cairo | Tuesday THE United States, France and other countries are moving ahead with preparations for the world’s biggest war games with some 70 000 troops in Egypt in October, Western diplomats said on Monday. The diplomats said they were virtually certain the war games, dubbed Operation Bright Star, would go head despite […]

Johannesburg | Monday LIBERATION fighters have no need to attack civilians, President Thabo Mbeki declared on Sunday, recalling the “moral” war against South Africa’s apartheid regime. “Even as our enemy and its friends denounced our movement as terrorist, we took strict measures to avoid the use of terror against the people,” Mbeki writes in a […]

NIGER President Mamadou Tandja on Monday reshuffled his government for the first time since the west African country’s fifth republic was formed on January 5, 2000. Prime Minister Hama Amadou was still in charge of a new cabinet of 23 ministers. Ten ministers retained their posts while 13 new faces were brought into the line-up. […]

JUSTIN ARENSTEIN & SAKHILE MOKOENA, Nelspruit | Tuesday MPUMALANGA’S sleepy capital Nelspruit intends creating a red light district as part of an initiative to regulate the region’s growing sex trade. Council representative Delia Oosthuizen confirmed that all six escort agencies in the city had been ordered to immediately move their operations into the central business […]

South African former president Nelson Mandela left South Africa on Monday to take a well-deserved two-week holiday at a secret location with his wife.

THE Ugandan government has allowed South African and Spanish firms to bid for two lucrative concessions in the Ugandan power sector, whose privatisation is in final stages, senior finance ministry official Emmanuel Nyirikindi said on Sunday. Nyirikindi said that the two firms — Eskom Enterprises of South Africa and Union Fenosa Internacional of Spain — […]

MORE than 120 Nigerian women have been deported from Benin on allegations of prostitution. A senior Nigerian immigration official, Ekpedeme King, told the television that the young women were deported last week after a raid by Beninois immigration officials. The girls, whose faces were shown on the television, are currently being screened by immigration and […]

A US federal court in Los Angeles on Monday postponed for the second time the sentencing of an Algerian convicted of terrorism in a plot to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport during 2000 millennium celebrations. “The sentencing has been continued until February 14th at (9:00 am) because the defence requested more time,” court representative […]

POLICE have detained more than 300 people in Lagos over Christian-Muslim violence that left more than 500 dead in the city of Jos last week. It was not clear if all would be charged with some offences or if some had already been released after questioning. Nigeria was shaken by violence that broke out in […]

RWANDAN-backed rebels said on Sunday around 2 650 child soldiers are waiting to be demobilised in the territory it controls in the east of the DRC. Crispen Kabasele, head of exterior relations for the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), said the majority of the children had been recruited by Alliance of Democratic Forces for the […]

LUNGA MASUKU, Nhlangano, Swaziland | Monday KING Mswati III of Swaziland put a dampener on festivities at his 33rd birthday celebrations recently when he announced a five year sex ban for young maidens in the tiny mountain kingdom. In a bid to reduce the soaring HIV/Aids figures the king saw fit to announce the revival […]

THE Bank of England sold 20 tons of gold, or 643_200 ounces, at $280,00 a troy ounce on Wednesday. The scheduled sale, which came in a disorientated market after yesterday’s US terror attack, was 4,3 times oversubscribed, with a scaling factor of 61,3818% applied to the successful bids at $280,00, the Bank of England said. […]

Johannesburg | Sunday AIDS has become the biggest single killer of South Africans, the South African Medical Research Council reports in a study made public on Sunday. It calculates that 40% of the deaths last year of those aged between 15 and 49 were due to the pandemic. The council predicts that about six million […]

FINANCIAL ratings firm Standard & Poor’s said on Thursday it did not believe Tuesday’s attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would have a long-term adverse impact on the economy. “Our economic, financial and debt analysts continue to assess the situation and we are convinced that this will not have a negative long-standing […]

GRIFFIN SHEA, Hwedza, Zimbabwe | Monday DESPITE three separate agreements aimed at resolving Zimbabwe’s land crisis, three more people have died during the last week as violence in the countryside rages unchecked. The latest deaths came on Saturday, when two people died during a clash on a white-owned farm in eastern Zimbabwe. A 70-year-old farmer […]

Harare | Sunday HOMES belonging to farm workers and the offices on a white-owned farm in eastern Zimbabwe were burned down on Saturday, a farmers’ spokeswoman said, despite government’s promise to curb violence in the countryside. “It is confirmed the office complex and farm workers’ houses were burned down. We can confirm serious injuries to […]

Harare | Sunday THE head of a UN team probing the looting of natural resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo has talked to Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, who has sent up to 12_000 troops to the war-ravaged country. Egypt’s ambassador to the United Nations Mahmoud Kassem met with Mugabe on Friday for what state […]

CRICKET Peter Robinson The point about arrogance is that it usually helps to have something to be arrogant about. Shaun Pollock’s South Africans were accused of arrogance on the grounds that they spurned the opportunity to warm up in Harare, arriving in Zimbabwe just two days before the first Test, but it took them less […]

Richard Norton-Taylor and Jon Henley in Paris The CIA, the FBI and the United States’s national security agency spend billions of dollars a year gathering intelligence abroad and combating terrorism at home significantly more than any other country. Their satellites can spot vehicle number plates and eavesdrop on millions of e-mails and telephone calls, yet […]

Tusi Fokane broadcasting and the national question by Jane Duncan Broadcasting and the National Question is a well-articulated and carefully constructed argument that explores the socio-economic and political agenda of the media in contemporary South African society through a critique of the policies of neo-liberalism and the “constructed realities” of globalisation. Author, Jane Duncan, is […]

Paul Kirk A can of coke for R12,50. An 8km taxi ride for R200. These aren’t the prices one can expect in 2050, they were the prices charged and paid in Durban until last weekend. Within a day after the delegates attending the World Conference against Racism left Durban, prices crashed. During the conference a […]

Provided you use your head, you can save 20% on the book price of the car you want by buying at an auction Gavin Foster Buying a second-hand car can be a tricky business. Do you go to a dealer or look for a cheap private deal? What happens if you buy a lemon that’s […]

Mail & Guardian reporters New York City had received more than 11 000 body bags by Thursday, although the number of dead from the terror attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon remains uncertain. The body bags were sent to hospitals in the city. They were carried by a convoy of tractor trailers […]

Barry Streek Financial disarray in the government’s secret services and secret funds, reminiscent of the apartheid era, has been uncovered by Auditor-General Shauket Fakie in two reports tabled in Parliament this week. The reports show the transfer of R51-million of secret funds to the police without the approval of Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, overspending […]

Jaspreet Kindra A security company is advertising the fact that it protects the South African president’s house. In a pamphlet that was distributed on Johannesburg streets this week, Chubb Armed Response/BBR Security states: “We protect the residence of our president and most corporate businesses in SA.” The pamphlet lists the fact that it provides security […]

REVIEW Gavin Foster Daihatsu YRV, R127 995 Funny little car, the Daihatsu YRV. It’s dinky. It’s fun. It’s quite lively. It’s very well equipped in some areas, with ABS and EBD, dual airbags, electric windows and an aircon as standard, but it falls down, rather unnecessarily, in others. Soundproofing could be better, the doors feel […]

analysis Larry Elliott It will be weeks, months, even years before the full economic effects of the disaster that befell New York and Washington can be assessed. But one thing is already certain: the impact will be colossal, not just on the United States but on the rest of the world. This was a shock […]

The former judge blunders on as he always has Comment Richard Calland Pricking the political mythology of contemporary South Africa is a precarious but nonetheless necessary pursuit. Take former Judge Willem Heath. Having conducted a persistent though ultimately self-corroding campaign to depict himself as the corruption-busting saviour of the new South Africa in the public […]

A South African athletics season that started badly improved in the last couple of weeks Martin Gillingham Anything’s possible at Athletics South Africa these days so it won’t come as any surprise if the powers-that-be in Houghton call a special meeting and declare that, from now on, the track and field calendar will start on […]

The president questions the link between HIV and Aids, yet he is no medical doctor, nor disease specialist. He relies on outdated statistics. He states that Aids is caused by poverty, yet his government wastes R48-billion on arms that South Africa does not need and will never use, unless involved in a conflict with the […]

The log section comes to an end this weekend Andy Capostagno The South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) has no plans to cancel the fixture between the Springboks and the United States Eagles in Houston, Texas, on December 1. Despite Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, Sarfu is pressing ahead with preparations for […]