FORMER Springbok eighthman Schutte Bekker will be back on the field for the Northern Bulls on Wednesday night after missing much of last season with a heart condition. Bekker will start on the bench in the warm-up match against the Blue Bulls. Northern Bulls: Casper Steyn; Hendry Pedro, Wynand Lourens, Eugene Meyer, Hannes Venter, Jaco […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT | Wednesday 7.00pm HEAVY rains which wracked Mpumalanga, the Northern Province and Gauteng over the past few days, killing at least 27 people and leaving scores missing and hundreds of thousands homeless had abated by late Wednesday. However the Weather Bureau has warned that more rain could fall before the weekend. In Mpumalanga, […]

AN Angolan army helicopter which crashed at the weekend killing 30 people was loaded far beyond its 24-seat capacity, witnesses said on Tuesday. According to witnesses, the Russian-built Mil-8 transport aircraft was carrying 37 people and two pigs when it took off on Saturday from the highland city of Lubango, 650km south of the capital […]

MEMBERSHIP of political parties has decreased significantly since 1994 according to a survey by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in Pretoria. The slip is even more evident among African respondents where active membership of political parties decreased from its high of 24% in 1994, to 10% in 1999. In the same period active membership […]

THE captain of the Cats Super 12 team, Rassie Erasmus, has been ruled out of the first two months of the competition because of a pelvic muscle injury. The Springbok loose forward underwent an operation on Wednesday after other remedies, including ballet classes, failed to rectify the problem. Andre Vos takes over the captaincy until […]

SOME 60 National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa members downed tools at Amplats’ Rustenburg base metal refinery on Thursday, mine spokesman Johan Adler said. The strike follows a deadlock in salary negotiations between mine management and the 291 Numsa members at the refinery. Adler said the mine offered an 8% increase but Numsa demanded […]

SCORES of Egyptian girls in Kano, northern Nigeria, on Monday continued their seige of the hotel housing the Egyptian football team. The girls, autograph hunters in their teens and early twenties, lurked around the hotel’s reception hall with the hope of getting the players’ attention. Some of the Egyptian players not only granted autographs but […]

AMPLATS announced on Tuesday that it has resolved a wage dispute at its Rustenburg Base Metals Refiners with the National Union of Mineworkers but that the dispute with the National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) continues. The company and NUM agreed on Monday afternoon to an 8% wage increase, backdated to January 1, Amplats senior manager […]

BANKS could nearly double profits and cut bank charges by 15% if they could win the battle against bank crime, The Star reports. In 1999, R68-million was stolen in bank robberies. According to the paper, crime committed at ATMs cost R55-million and fraud estimated to cost about R4-billion a year. In 1998, banks made a […]

MORE than 400 lecturers and researchers at Zambia’s largest state-run university have gone on an indefinite strike in protest against the non-payment of their January salaries, a senior union official said on Thursday. University of Zambia lecturers and researchers union vice-president Douglas Syakalima, said, that academic staff at the institution decided to strike late on […]