A contingent of 875 Tanzanian soldiers headed for peacekeeping duties in Darfur received armoured personnel carriers, trucks and other equipment worth $6.2 million from the US armed forces.
The British High Commission, in conjunction with the Journalists’ Environmental Association of Tanzania (JET), is organising a media competition on climate change. Head of the Mission Diane Corner said that the competition would take place 20 days before the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen. The winner would attend the conference in order to cover it.
Members of CCM in Britain have been urged to promote Tanzania. The party secretary for finance and economy, Amos Makala, said this in London while opening an annual meeting of CCM members in Britain. He blamed Tanzanians in the diaspora who adopted “unpatriotic” attitudes towards the country by tarnishing its image. “I call upon you to work hard to counter these instigators who conduct negative campaigns for their personal gain,” Makala said – Mwananchi
A 17-year old British student in a school party in July was found at Dar airport to be infected with Swine flu. He flew via Kenya Airways with a stopover at Nairobi airport. He was in an advanced detachment of 350 students visiting Tanzania for tourism and training during the summer vacation. He was kept in a special ward at Muhimbili Hospital and his condition soon improved- Habari Leo.
The Tanzanian Ahmed Ghailani is to be prosecuted in a Federal Court in New York. The charges relate to the August 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed more than 200 people. According to the transcript of a closed-door hearing in March 2007, Ghailani admitted delivering explosives used to blow up the US embassy in Dar es Salaam but said that he did not know about the attack beforehand and apologised to the US government and the victims’ families. He is considered to be a “high value detainee” at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba by the CIA. Ghailani was seized in Pakistan in 2004.
A British national caused the Manyara magistrate’s court to be suspended for a while after she broke into tears when she saw a man she claimed to have raped her. The volunteer teacher had arrived in Babati from Britain in February. According to Nipashe on 1 April at 3.45 pm the alleged rapist, a project coordinator with “Farm Africa”, entered the room of the complainant without her consent and sexually assaulted her. Neighbours informed the school management and the matter was reported to police who arrested the accused. The case was adjourned and the accused was allowed out on bail.
The Observer reported that University Vice-Chancellor Prof Rwekaza Mukandala had ‘torn apart’ his lecturers when he addressed them in April. They had blamed declining academic standards at the university on ‘semesterization.’At the end of the session, in which the lecturers had called for a ‘revamping and overhauling’ of the university (to the applause of the students) the Vice-Chancellor called the lecturers ‘lazy and money-hungry’ as they moved from institution to institution, often on the same day, in order to acquire greater income. He had asked them to send him revised curricula of the programmes they were teaching but had received responses from only six out of 1,200 faculties. Lecturers were simply not according their duties the seriousness they deserved, he said.