The South Africa government has condemned an attack on Cape Town mayor Helen Zille during the disruption of a meeting over the weekend. ”Government condemns this kind of behaviour without qualification. Our Constitution guarantees free political activity for all parties and individuals,” government spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe said on Monday.
The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of a veteran employee last week included an unusual lie detector test for CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, The New York Times reported on Monday.
South African Airways will introduce a daily service on its route between Johannesburg and Washington-Dulles International airport. As a result, it will discontinue its daily service to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International airport. The airline’s route between Johannesburg and Washington was launched at the end of June 2005 with four flights a week, including an operational fuel stop in Accra, Ghana.
Iraq’s political leaders on Sunday threw their weight behind the choice of Jawad al-Maliki as the prime minister-designate, and prepared to unveil a 33-point plan to renew Iraq and remove the need for foreign troops. As Maliki opened discussions on forming a new Cabinet, Jalal Talabani, the President, said the straight-talking Shia politician was the ”right man” to head a government of national unity.
A former leading CIA official said on Sunday that the White House deliberately ignored intelligence that showed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Tyler Drumheller, who was once the highest-ranking CIA officer in Europe, told CBS’s 60 Minutes programme that the White House shifted its focus to regime change in the months before the invasion.
A thousand people fled on Monday and at least another 9 000 were on stand-by for evacuation in Romania after the swollen River Danube burst its banks. As well as the worst-hit country, Romania, flood waters have waterlogged homes, farmland and transport links in Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria.
A pioneering study raises sharp questions about the ability of further education and training colleges to play the skills development role that government policy expects of them. However, the national Department of Education said recently it had devised new programmes for implementation next year that will revolutionise skills training in colleges.
Home to hundreds of aircraft under Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime, the dusty al-Muthana air base outside the Iraqi capital today hosts just three lonely cargo planes. After obliterating Saddam’s formidable air force in the 1991 Gulf war and the invasion of 2003, United States forces say they are now putting the pieces back together in the hope that Iraqis will eventually take over for the coalition.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on Monday voiced concern about the ethics of current clinical trials on microbicides. The recruitment and compensation of candidates who suffer complications from clinical trials in developing countries needed further discussion, the minister said at the start of a three-day international microbicides conference in Cape Town.
Microsoft began a challenge on Monday before the European Union’s second-highest court of the European Commission’s landmark antitrust ruling against it, arguing that the future of innovation in the technology industry was at stake. In an opening statement, Microsoft lawyer Jean-Francois Bellis said the commission made ”serious errors” in its decision two years ago that the company abused its dominant market position.