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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Nicholas Guyatt predicted the attack The American military has overwhelmed its opponents abroad and an increasing reliance on air power and guided missiles has mini-mised disruption or even awareness of these conflicts at home. Given the increasing pace of technological change, however, it is hard to believe that the United States will continue to go […]

Mail & Guardian reporter Combined Fishing Enterprises, one of a few of the genuine black-owned family businesses in the fishing industry, has weathered many a storm in realising its goals. Its vision is to become a formid-able force in the South African fishing industry and to have a world-renowned brand of quality products. The family […]

Ghosts of electricity CDs of the week Bob Dylan:Love and Theft; The Essential Bob Dylan Shaun de Waal The first track on Bob Dylan’s new album, Love and Theft (Columbia), makes one fear the worst. Hearing Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, with its careless rhymes and silly metaphors, you think: Oh no, not another Under […]

The clothes at this year’s Fashion Week were creative and youthful, more wearable and affordable Charl Blignaut Bustling through the doors two shows late and already out of breath on the first day of Fashion Week, you’ve got to wonder how there can be next to nothing going down in Jo’burg for weeks on end […]

Belinda Beresford As President Thabo Mbeki waded back into the controversy surrounding HIV/Aids, the government was preparing to defend itself in court against its former allies, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The TAC lawsuit accuses the national and provincial health departments of breaching the Constitution by failing to provide anti-retroviral drugs to HIV-positive pregnant women. […]

comment Seumas Milne Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become clear that most Americans simply don’t get it. From the president to passers-by on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy that […]

Twelve useful-looking three-year-old males go to the post for the R125000 Falcon Sprint, a handicap over 1200m at Turffontein on Saturday, and a number of them have chances of taking home the winner’s stake. The David Ferraris-trained Appeal Process, a son of Australian sire Volksraad, has been allocated joint top weight by the handicapper and […]

Matthew Engel reports on the strange silence that has gripped the city that never sleeps By daybreak on Wednesday Manhattan had been divided into four zones. Like Berlin of old. The whole downtown area, below 14th Street, was officially sealed off by police, though residents, workers and anyone with ingenuity could get through. It was […]

Glenda Daniels In a major departure, the government has suggested incentives, rather than penalties, to induce farmers to observe a new minimum wage for farm workers. Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana announced proposals for minimum rates for close to a million agricultural employees this week, ranging from R400 to R750 a month. They are the […]

Joseph Hanlon The fallout from the murder of a corruption-busting Mozambican banker may complicate South African banking giant Absa’s bid to buy the bank the murdered man headed. Banco Austral’s interim president, Antnio Siba-Siba Macucua, was thrown down a 15-storey stairwell at the bank’s Maputo headquarters on August 11, two days before Absa was to […]

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 […]