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/ 4 November 2006
The military will not be used to help cash-in-transit teams, but business and the government will work together to battle the heists, said Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula on Friday. ”There are other ways which this particular problem can be attended to,” Nqakula told a press briefing in Johannesburg.
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/ 4 November 2006
The arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, who, for the first time, faces prosecution for torture, is a milestone in the struggle for justice in Chile, Human Rights Watch said this week. Pinochet is charged with the torture of 23 people, as well as the kidnapping of 34 and one homicide, which were carried out at a secret government detention centre after he came to power in the 1973 military coup.
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/ 4 November 2006
Veteran Anglo watcher Jim Jones offers unsolicited advice to new chief Cynthia Carroll.
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/ 4 November 2006
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel last week upped the government’s contribution to the pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) to R9-billion, with a commitment to spend R6-billion over the next three years. The money keeps rolling into what was originally a R2-billion project — but whether it is a hugely expensive dud or a money-spinner will not be known for at least five years.
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/ 4 November 2006
Threats of bloody retribution and accusations of American involvement erupted across Pakistan’s tribal areas this week after the missile strike that killed 80 people in a radical madrasa. About 20Â 000 tribesmen crowded into Khar, about 10km from the school, which was shredded by air strikes on Monday. Cries of ”Down with America” rang out as radical clerics addressed the turbaned protesters, many of whom brandished Kalashnikovs or rocket launchers.
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/ 4 November 2006
The Gauteng government’s public transport summit, convened by its Transport Minister Ignatius Jacobs this week, was a crude bluff. In the context of failed taxi recapitalisation, a bungled car-pool-lane experiment, a Gautrain project plagued with glitches and, most importantly, heightened debate about the necessity for public transport, the summit missed the opportunity to grapple with the mobility needs of Gauteng citizens.
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/ 4 November 2006
Historic talks between the Swazi government and the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) on the country’s political system came to a halt this week when the government invited intelligence officers from the Royal Swaziland Police to attend the talks. The talks were initiated after the NCA, circulated a petition last week criticising the country’s new constitution, which came into effect in February this year.
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/ 4 November 2006
After his landslide victory in last Sunday’s runoff election, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised that his first step would be to push through political reforms, and underlined that the poor would remain the top priority in his second term, which begins on January 1.
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/ 3 November 2006
Thuli Makhubu, the Mail & Guardian’s receptionist, is a few weeks away from giving birth to her second child. Sameer Mehta, her ”husband” of two years, whom she found out about two weeks ago, is in hiding, being protected from her wrath by the department of home affairs.
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/ 3 November 2006
Now that the posturing and rhetoric that has dominated Western Cape politics in the two months prior to this week’s agreed compromise on the system of local government is over there is one clear victor: the citizens of Cape Town. The decision has been hailed by various commentators as ”mature”, and by the local media as ”the kind of compromise that good politicians make in the interests of the people they serve”.