Editors Note: Zarina Geloo returns to the Times of Zambia sixteen years later.

Everything seems to have changed since I was last the Times of Zambia, it was a little unnerving, but I realised very quickly that actually, things are still the same.

Editors Note: You don't have to go very far to find health stories in Maputo...just listen in the newsroom.

The health page was laid out late last week. I had a headache so I went home around 7 pm to lie down. Around 9:30 the editor called: our turn for layout. I hopped on a taxi and dashed to Savana, It was unbearably hot and humid. The newsroom is in the basement of an old house. The sub was sitting on the steps to the garden.

Editors Note: Six hours of non-stop rain bring city to standstill in Mozambique.

It started with a tap-tap-tap on the window around 3 AM. Half asleep, I thanked the rain as a blessing, a respite from the scorching heat we’ve been having in Maputo, up to 38 Celsius.

The tap-tap-tap became a steady, non-stop, six-hour-long downpour. By 8 am, chunks of the city were cut off. People could not go to work.  In the Baixa, the financial centre downtown, by the bay, people were swimming with water at chest level. Muddy water flooded into banks and shops. Traffic stopped. Schools closed.

An award from the Minister of Health is just one prize for Daily Mail's malaria reporting, as journalists see rates of the disease drop.

Editors Note: Repairing tiny faulty hearts in Maputo - what's Tina Turner got to do with it?In our busy interconnected lives, the only spaces where we are off-line and off-cellphone may be the shower and the airplane. Showers one mostly takes alone. Planes are a collective space but we, mass travel sufferers and on-line junkies, act as if they weren’t.

We shut down and hunker into our individual bubble without even a hello to the next passenger. We use flight time to read, work, doze, or just be, as Greta Garbo would say: Ah-lone.

It is understandable.

Editors Note: Media freedoms in Ghana compromise credibility of news.

This morning thousands of people all over Ghana arrived late for work and they were exhausted from being up all night… all for the same reason. No, it had nothing to do with a sports match in a different time zone. Ghanaians everywhere did not sleep because they feared an earthquake.

The deaths of two editors sadden colleagues and send a message. Two of my colleagues at the Zambia Daily Mail died on Christmas day, casting, as the newspaper's story the next day said, a dark cloud over us. Both died after illnesses, that were not described in the story.

Mr. Pelekelo Liswaniso the newspaper's production editor was 50 years old. Ms. Diana Zulu, sports editor was 39.

Both had been amongst us long enough and recently enough for their loss to be jarring as well as very, very sad.

Editors Note: New information technologies used during presidential election in Mozambique.Mozambique held presidential elections at the end of October, with the final results announced in mid-November. You couldn’t ignore the campaign buzz in the weeks leading to the polls: horn-honking caravans, city walls covered in colourful posters, supporters wearing T-shirts, caps and kapulanas (African cloth) emblazoned with party colours and logos.

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — Reporters have a choice on World AIDS Day. They can go to the press conferences, the speeches, the red-ribbon-test-a-thons that happen every year, and write down what everyone said -- again.