THE 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) is seeking concrete ways to cut off fuel supplies to Angolan rebels, SADC members attending an annual meeting in Kinshasa announced at the weekend. Despite a UN embargo against rebels, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) continues to profit from a lucrative diamond trade […]
A DUTCH couple who spent three years working alongside exiled African National Congress cadres living in a Tanzanian camp have created a website which attempts to reconstruct the camp. The website is intended to become a database of personal histories, photographs, maps, plans and other information about the camp. Bing Mller and Gea Mulder were […]
Cape Town | Tuesday A majority of black South Africans surveyed believe that whites are racist and untrustworthy and find it hard to imagine ever being friends with them, according to findings of a poll released on Monday. The survey, carried out for the Cape Town-based Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), also found that […]
Jeremy Lovell, Windsor | Wednesday SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki, ending the first day of his first state visit to Britain on Tuesday, thanked his royal hosts and the country for support since the end of apartheid seven years ago. “We know it as a matter of fact that Her Majesty, the rest of the […]
NIGERIAS President Olusegun Obasanjo has sacked four ministers including his minister for communications, officials said on Tuesday. The four ministers to be fired were Communications Minister Mohammed Arzika, Water Resources Minister Mohammed Arzika, and the deputy ministers for the capital territory and for power and steel, officials said in a statement. Four senior advisers, including […]
THE Canadian House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday granting honorary citizenship to former South African president Nelson Mandela. The resolution was passed just days after a member of the right-wing opposition Canadian Alliance, Rob Anders, used a procedural tactic to block the house from giving Mandela the honour. It was jointly moved […]
GENERIC antiretrovirals will from Tuesday be given to 76 Kenyan orphans who have tested HIV-positive, under a ground-breaking programme, said a priest spearheading the project. Father Angelo D’Agostino said the programme, in which drugs donated by a Brazilian company are to be used, would be instituted at Nairobi’s Nyumbani orphanage, which he runs. The medicine, […]
A 10-year-old Egyptian girl emerged unscathed on Sunday despite falling off the roof of a six-storey apartment building while flying a kite, police said. Marwa Tohami surprised neighbours, who expected her to die when she hit the ground, by picking herself up and running back upstairs to the roof of the building in her working […]
A SCHOOL headmaster and his four-year-old son have been killed in Gasenyi, northern Burundi, by rebels from the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), an official said on Monday. The official, in the neighbouring borough of Rango, said the FDD had killed Macaire Bizimana because he refused to collaborate with them. On June 2 […]
FOUR people died and three were missing after their boat sank off Cabinda in north Angola, Portugal’s Lusa news agency reported Monday. Fourteen people were rescued after the incident on Saturday. The vessel sank in heavy seas after leaving the port of Cabinda for the town of Soyo in the Angolan province of Zaire. – […]
Pretoria | Wednesday A SENIOR arms official on Wednesday ruled out the possibility that bias or manipulation could have influenced the final selection of suppliers in South Africa’s multi-billion dollar arms deal. “There was no possibility of bias,” David Griesel, acquisition head of former state-owned arms manufacturer Armscor, told a public probe into alleged corruption […]
PRICES of fuel in Zimbabwe shot up on Tuesday by between 51% and 82%, state television reported. Petrol went up by 74% to $1.38 while diesel rose over 67% to $1.20, with aviation fuel seeing the biggest rise, up over 82% to $1.03. The state-owned National Oil Company of Zimbabwe (NOZCIM) blamed the increases on […]
WAR veterans occupying an Indonesian-owned ostrich farm in western Zimbabwe cut off water supplies there at the weekend, depriving the birds of drinking water, state news agency ZIANA reported on Sunday. A representative for Dollar Bubi, a multi-million dollar project rearing some 2_600 birds, told ZIANA that the continued occupation and disruption at the farm […]
FORTUNE hunters in South Africa will be able to dig for gold coins next month on a farm where about 16,000 coins have been found and thousands more could be left, a local official said on Tuesday. “The dig will be a proper gold rush on a first come, first serve basis, no claims will […]
SWAZILAND is considering passing a tough pollution control bill that will impose fines of between R50_000 and R250_000 or jail sentences of one to five years. The proposed Environment Management Bill has already been published in the Government Gazette and is expected to be passed in Parliament later this month. “Manufacturers are being warned not […]
It seems that Sharon Stone’s life does not imitate art so much as a bad Hollywood B-movie. After last week’s legal pot-boiler, which saw the <i>Casino</i> star launching a lawsuit against the producers of the aborted <i>Basic Instinct</i> sequel, events spun from the ugly to the ridiculous.
Peter Kononczuk, London | Tuesday SOUTH African President Thabo Mbeki will arrive in Britain on Tuesday for a state visit during which he will seek badly-needed investment and may face questions on his policies on Zimbabwe and Aids. It is the second state visit to London by a South African leader in five years, following […]
Vincent Mayanja, Kampala | Tuesday SCIENTISTS from the United States and Uganda have unveiled plans for Africa’s first major Aids facility to train medical personnel and give patients high standards of care. The $11-million facility is being funded by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and will be based in Kampala as part of the city’s main Mulago […]
NIGERIAS privatisation agency has extended the deadline by a week for foreign telecoms companies to express interest in buying state telecom company Nitel, the government said on Tuesday. Prospective investors have until 5:00 p.m. on June 18 to submit their applications to the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), the office of President Olusegun Obasanjo said […]
Harare | Monday ZIMBABWEAN President Robert Mugabe said on Monday his land reform efforts have been distorted by “extraneous political issues”, such as democracy, the rule of law, press freedom and judicial independence. Mugabe said his government had “a clear conscience” in going ahead with the violence-wracked program to resettle poor blacks on white-owned lands, […]
SOUTH African telecoms group M-Cell is expected to lift annual headline earnings per share by a third when it reports on Wednesday, with investors looking out for prospects for M-Cell’s new Nigerian operations. Analysts polled by Multex forecast headline EPS – which strip out exceptional items and their tax effects — of 67 cents in […]
LESOTHO and South Africa created a joint 8_000-square-kilometre conservation area on Monday over mountains straddling the border. The Maluti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation Area will incorporate Lesotho’s Sehlaba-Thebe (Plateau of the Shield) national park in the southeast of the small kingdom and several South African reserves in KwaZulu-Natal province. The area created will stretch from the Golden […]
THE 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) is seeking concrete ways to cut off fuel supplies to Angolan rebels, SADC members attending an annual meeting in Kinshasa announced at the weekend. Despite a United Nations embargo against rebels, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) continues to profit from a lucrative diamond […]
Pretoria | Monday PUBLIC hearings into allegations of corruption surrounding South Africa’s $5.5-billion arms procurement deal started in Pretoria on Monday – but the proceedings will not be aired live on television or on the radio. A panel consisting of members of three government agencies probing the deal, turned down an application by public broadcaster […]
SOUTH Africa’s cash-strapped Department of Defence (DOD) was not ready to deal with a multi-project defence package in the late 1990’s, a senior military official testified on Tuesday. Rear-Admiral Keg Verster, the first witness to testify at a probe into alleged corruption surrounding the country’s $5,5-billion arms procurement deal, said the defence department at the […]
THE Daily Mail & Guardian has been selected by the authoritative Forbes.com Best of the Web magazine as one of the world?s finest sites. The DM&G was placed second, behind The Guardian website, in the foreign newspaper papers section. Forbes said it was ?easy to see why? Nelson Mandela apparently requested the newspaper while imprisoned. […]
A 20-strong team of Nigerian police officers will soon leave for Kinshasa to train their counterparts in the DRC, a representative said on Monday. A squad to be led by an assistant police commissioner will conduct a training exercise there at the request of the DRC government, said force representative Haz Iwendi. – AFP
A TEAM of British police are due in Zambia on Monday to help in the investigation of Friday’s murder of Paul Tembo, a former close aide of the Zambian president. Tembo was killed Friday by two unidentified gunmen in what is believed to have been a politically motivated murder. Tembo, 41 was killed on the […]
MEMBERS of the South African parliament on Thursday angrily debated the conduct of its speaker after months of accusations that she had tried to control an investigation into a $5.5 billion-dollar arms acquisition deal. Opposition parties charged that speaker Frene Ginwala of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) had abused her power to protect fellow […]
POLITICAL stability, macroeconomic fundamentals and growth and a plan to combat Aids are necessary to attract foreign investment to southern Africa, a business leader said on Friday. “Those countries who compete successfully are those that rank high on this list of criteria,” said Niall FitzGerald, co-chairman of the giant consumer goods company Unilever. FitzGerald was […]
NIGERIAS hundreds of traditional rulers, royals and other dignitaries are battling a proposal in parliament to limit the use of traffic sirens. A bill currently working its way through the national assembly seeks to regulate the use of the siren by Nigeria’s rich and powerful to force a way through the country’s chronic traffic jams. […]
A PORTION of the Kruger millions may have been found in Ermelo, in the southern part of Mpumalanga, by local farm workers, The Citizen newspaper reported on Friday. The Ermelo Town Council are now discussing security measures to protect the farmer and workers at the centre of the drama, the newspaper said. A Zulu family […]