Floor-crossing battles kept two Cape High Court judges busy for the better part of the day on Monday. At stake in two cases involving the United Democratic Movement and the Independent Democrats are two seats in the National Assembly, one in the National Council of Provinces and five in various provincial legislatures.
Suspended United Democratic Movement deputy president Malizole Diko plans to form a new party, according to affidavits filed this week in the Cape High Court. The documents are part of the UDM’s bundle of papers in reply to a bid by Diko and five other party officials for an interdict lifting their suspension from the party.
President Thabo Mbeki is ”trying his best” to resolve the situation in Zimbabwe, Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane said in Cape Town on Wednesday after a two-and-a-half-hour meeting in Pretoria on Tuesday night between Mbeki and a South African Council of Churches delegation.
The 250-million-year-old galesaurus on Annelise Crean’s workbench at the South African Museum is a superbly prepared fossil, its tracery of delicate off-white bones standing out from a matrix of fine grey sandstone. But where the dusty eye sockets should be, there is a surprise: the creature has protuberant, glistening and definitely not prehistoric brown eyeballs.
The 250-million-year-old Galesaurus on Annelise Crean’s workbench at the South African Museum is a superbly prepared fossil, its tracery of delicate off-white bones standing out from a matrix of fine grey sandstone. But where the dusty eye sockets should be, there is a surprise: the creature has protuberant, glistening and definitely not prehistoric brown eyeballs.
The government is being asked to consider a new deal for South Africa’s 1 240 public libraries, currently floundering in the no-man’s-land of an ”unfunded mandate”, meaning provinces do not get money from the national government to meet this responsibility, according to the head of the Centre for the Book.
Elisabeth Anderson is passionate about books and reading, which is perhaps no more than one would expect from the head of Cape Town’s Centre for the Book. But she also burns with an almost missionary zeal to infuse this passion into others. And if there is for this champion of the written word a force of darkness that has to be beaten back, it is South Africa’s massive illiteracy rate.
Cape Town taximen have been deliberately sabotaging the city’s rail services in order to gain customers, the commission of inquiry into violence in the Western Cape minibus taxi industry heard on Friday. Metrorail’s regional manager handed the commission a document he said contained ”very sensitive information” on the issue.
The head of the commission into Western Cape taxi violence clashed on Wednesday with a senior legal adviser to the City of Cape Town on the issue of witness safety. The confrontation took place in the wake of the slaying at the weekend of a prominent figure in the taxi industry, who only days earlier had testified to the commission.
The man who illegally processed cash for the Democratic Alliance that may have come from now-jailed fraudster Jurgen Harksen has been appointed the party’s provincial director in the Western Cape. Erik Marais paid a R10 000 fine in 2003 for violating foreign exchange regulations after his role was exposed in hearings of the Desai commission of inquiry.