Students and staff at the University of Stellenbosch have united against a group of alumni, widely described as ”conservative old-timers”, who are opposed to a posthumous honorary doctorate for communist leader and advocate Bram Fischer.
The award has triggered a battle between the university’s council and senate, and the body of graduate students and academic staff, highlighting how deeply divided die volk still is.

With a warrant for his arrest dropped and a new passport in his back pocket, alleged Cosa Nostra financier Vito Palazzolo seems set to return to his homeland.
This week Italian prosecutors from the Palermo jurisdiction began hearing evidence in Cape Town as a last-ditch attempt to prosecute him, but even this attempt appears doomed as key witnesses will not be appearing in court.

The murder rate in Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township has dropped by almost a third in the past year — well above the 22,5% decline for the Western Cape and the 9,9% reduction nationally. The sprawling poverty-stricken apartheid township recorded 574 murders in the 2002/03 financial year, — about a sixth of all murders in the whole Western Cape. But today, it’s no longer is the country’s murder capital.

”In a sense it is easier to win the faith of people, [but] people do have greater expectations. The fact that one has collapsed this false battle with national [government] has meant the amount of cooperation and ability to tap into national processes has been enormous … Look at housing! ” Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool talks to Marianne Merten about his first 100 days in office.

Parliament has taken legal action against five MPs after they defaulted on repaying owed travel monies, but it remains mum on the names of those implicated in the multimillion-rand travel voucher scam. Ten MPs have signed acknowledgement of debts following the liquidation of ITC Travel, whose director, Estelle Aggujaro, is one of the seven travel agents arrested by the Scorpions in July.

”I had the guts to fight these men,” said former Western Cape MEC Frieda Adams following this week’s conclusion of her four-year legal battle over her allegations of sexual harassment and defamation against former party colleagues Peter Marais and Gerald Morkel. Although awarding her damages for injured feelings, the Cape High Court found that Adams had not sufficiently proved her case of sexual harassment.

Part of the forensic audit carried out at the instruction of Parliament into ”Travelgate” — the parliamentary travel voucher scam — points to a potential legal nightmare for investigators to unravel. At first glance, MPs’ travel vouchers have been misused through the booking of flights and cancellation of tickets. But it remains unclear whether the MPs are guilty of anything other than a lack of attention to detail.