ZIMBABWE?S Roman Catholic bishops have lashed out at President Robert Mugabe’s government, and denounced the 15-month campaign of violence led by liberation war veterans loyal to him. The pastoral letter, which will be distributed to every Catholic church, school and institution in Zimbabwe, is the harshest criticism yet of Mugabe’s regime from any of the […]
THE Zimbabwe government has described as “uncorroborated” a report by an international panel of high-ranking lawyers who said that democracy and the rule of law in the country were “in the gravest peril.” In the report produced for the International Bar Association (IBA), the laywers said the government of President Robert Mugabe was deeply implicated […]
TONY Yengeni, chief whip of the ANC in Parliament, was apparently six weeks ago ordered by the investigation teams into alleged irregularities in the R43bn arms deal to present evidence about certain “assets” that could be connected to the transactions, says Afrikaans daily Beeld. Yengeni’s lawyer apparently said his schedule would only permit this to […]
THE SA government and pharmaceutical companies have reached agreement over the issue of pricing of Aids drugs, the Swiss Interpharma association was reported as saying in Basle, Switzerland on Wednesday. Interpharma chief executive Thomas Cueni said the agreement would also mean the withdrawal by companies of legal action in Pretoria against government legislation, The Star […]
PAN Africanist Congress President Dr Stanley Mogoba says a poverty eradication tax is critical for all South Africans to be comfortable, calling poverty a time bomb which “might blow up in our faces sooner rather than later.” In his opening address at the party’s annual conference at Vista University in Bloemfontein, he said urged the […]
PUBLIC threats directed at a journalist is the behaviour expected of thugs in Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF party, and not of a spokesman of the African National Congress, says the man in the middle of a furore sparked by calling President Mbeki a womaniser. Writing in his regular column in The Star newspaper, journalist Max du […]
THE African National Congress has accused prominent journalist Max du Preez of being a racist for saying that President Thabo Mbeki is a womaniser, accused him of ”irresponsible behaviour which bordered on hate speech?. In an emotional statement, ANC national spokesman Smuts Ngonyama said: ?Max du Preez and his ‘old friends’ have clearly embarked on […]
THE driver of a bus which crashed in eastern South Africa in September 1999, killing 27 British tourists and a South African tour guide, pressed the accelerator instead of the brake, his lawyer said. Representing Titus Phillip Dube, 41, who was found guilty of culpable homicide in February, Gerhard Kotzee asked the Lydenburg Regional Court […]
SLAUGHTERED by colonists, ruthlessly oppressed by South Africa’s apartheid regime and marginalised under the country’s young democracy, South Africa’s indigenous people, once derisively known as Bushmen and Hottentots, say they have had enough. The leaders of almost all the country’s major indigenous groups gathered at a conference that ended Sunday to demand redress for past […]
ENVIRONMENTALISTS have reacted with fury and dismay to a White House decision not to back the Kyoto Protocol on global warming – a deal previously agreed by the Clinton administration. “The world is tottering on the brink of climate disaster,” Friends of the Earth Europe said in a statement, in which it accused President George […]