Gauteng provincial minister of education Angie Motshekga is to apply for a court interdict prohibiting members of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union from striking, her department said on Friday. If the application is refused, the planned strike will affect examinations in the Soweto area, said spokesperson Panyaza Lesufi.
President Thabo Mbeki has expressed disappointment at the poor turnout for the centenary celebration of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha (non-violent resistance) in Durban last weekend, saying the truth will out. Writing in his weekly newsletter on the African National Congress (ANC) website on Friday, Mbeki referred to the historic visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Zimbabwe said on Friday it hoped to secure investment deals from a visiting Russian business delegation, a potential boost to its ailing economy and Moscow’s own bid to raise its economic profile in Southern Africa. Analysts said Russia’s interest in the sub-region, following a determined push by China, signalled growing competition for Africa’s natural resources as the two economies boom.
Mittal Steel South Africa has bought two steel mills in Mozambique to grow its sub-Saharan presence, the company said on Friday. The ,45-million purchase was the first Mittal had made out of South Africa. It formed part of a memorandum of cooperation that the company was finalising with the Mozambican government.
The Nazis used human fat to make soap during World War II in a Nazi German medical academy located in what is now the Polish Baltic sea port city of Gdansk, Polish war crimes prosecutors confirmed on Friday, pointing to new laboratory tests.
Protesters gathered outside the United States embassy in Pretoria and its consulate in Cape Town on Friday to demand the release of the so-called Cuban Five. The protesters — about 200 in Pretoria and what one participant said were about 80 in Cape Town — included representatives of the African National Congress and its alliance partners.
Thousands of Zimbabweans have joined a diamond rush in a remote eastern district of the country, cutting down trees and digging pits and gullies in a desperate attempt to strike it rich, a weekly newspaper reported on Friday. Schoolchildren and the elderly have joined the diamond panners in the Marange communal lands, the Manica Post said.
In an engaging paper given last week under the aegis of the Philosophy Society of the University of Cape Town (UCT), Dr Ben Kotzee expanded on a subject one wouldn’t ordinarily expect to see on a list of academic monographs. Kotzee’s title was Our Vision and Our Mission: Bullshit, Assertion and Belief. So portentous a title cries out to be misconstrued.
South Africa captain Graeme Smith said on Friday that his team was one of the favourites to lift the Champions Trophy and that his players were raring to go. ”We are ranked second in the world and there is no shying away from the fact that we are one of the top teams,” Smith told reporters.
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It was still unclear at lunch on Friday whether African National Congress (ANC) deputy president Jacob Zuma and President Thabo Mbeki would both attend the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting on the weekend. The NEC will meet behind closed doors for three days at Esselen Park on Gauteng’s East Rand amid questions about a possible rift between Zuma and Mbeki.