Former United States president Bill Clinton received a superstar’s welcome when he addressed a group of young community volunteers at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton, Johannesburg, on Tuesday. Clinton is on a six-country tour of Southern African projects in which the Clinton Foundation is involved.
The storm in a tea cup over the use of the word ”rooibos” finally ended this week with an agreement that worldwide registration of the name will be cancelled. This concludes a protracted R6-million rights and licence fee dispute. The name ”rooibos” was initially registered by cosmetic giant Annique Theron in 1994.
The Constitutional Court ruling on Monday that the Minister of Safety and Security was liable for the rape of a woman by three policemen was ”extremely positive”, the attorney for the rape victim said on Monday. The court said the policemen bore a statutory and constitutional duty to prevent crime and protect the members of the public — a duty which also rested on their employer.
South Africa’s largest gold-miner, AngloGold Ashanti, ”messed up” when its employees in a north-eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) paid about 000 (R61 800) in bribes to the Nationalist and Integrationist Front, the group’s CEO, Bobby Godsell, said on Wednesday.
Very cold and wet conditions are due to hit parts of the country this weekend, but for many people a weekend of hot chocolate and romantic snuggling is a remote thought — finding ways of keeping warm safely is far more pressing. But makeshift measures such as illegal electricity connections can be deadly.
The Constitutional Court ruled on Wednesday that the 62 prisoners still on death row should have their death sentences set aside and replaced as soon as possible. There is no need for another trial, as the prisoners were already tried and sentenced in an open court. The death sentence was declared unconstitutional in 1995.
Headman Nkonzo was clutching a hosepipe on level 32 of shaft four at East Driefontein gold mine on Monday when the earth began shaking violently. The 53-year-old mineworker said all he could think when the rocks began falling was that he was going to die. ”I was scared, it was all too much,” he said.
”The DA is alarmed at the allegations made in the M&G that the ANC funded its 2004 election campaign using millions of rands of taxpayers’ money.”
The case of two men arrested last year on weapons of mass destruction charges was transferred to Pretoria during their appearance in the Vanderbijlpark Regional Court on Wednesday. A court official said the two made a brief appearance and the case was transferred to the Pretoria High Court for August 22.
”We just want that little white piece of paper,” said Marie Fourie during a break at the Constitutional Court on Tuesday, drawing an air square with her fingers. ”We just want it to be legal, legal, legal,” she said from the front of the public gallery where she and Cecilia Bonthuys spent the day listening to argument over what constituted a marriage.