TUESDAY, 2.30PM: THE International Monetary Fund on Monday approved a $175-million, 13-month stand-by credit to Zimbabwe, which is destined to assist the government in funding its 1998 economic reform programme. Some $52-million of the loan will be made immediately available to the government, while the remainder will be paid at quarterly intervals, subject to the […]
ABOUT 3000 people are waiting in voting queues filling the park surrounding Yeoville’s Community Centre where Gauteng’s second largest polling station is based. Voters are waiting on average of four and a half hours to get to the polls. The IEC says the pace is picking up, with voters going into the two voting halls […]
POLLING stations in the Highveld region of Mpumalanga have requested extended voting hours as snags and staff shortages are preventing them from processing more than 100 voters per hour. IEC media spokesman Leon Mbangwa said on Wednesday afternoon that polling stations in the rural Moutse and Mbibane areas of the former KwaNdebele had requested that […]
PAN Africanist Congress firebrand, Patricia de Lille, cast her vote in Pinelands, Cape Town, early this afternoon. De Lille arrived in a wheelchair after weeks in hospital following a car crash while she was on the election trail. Despite probably qualifying for a special vote, De Lille, unlike many other high profile political leaders, refused […]
CHRISTIAN Solidarity International, a non-governmental organisation involved in a controversy over Sudan’s slave trade, said on Wednesday it had freed almost 1400 slaves in May. CSI has liberated a total of 9112 Sudanese slaves since the start of its campaign in 1995. The Zurich-based NGO frees the slaves by buying them. The method has been […]
THE head of a 19-member Commonwealth observer group, Britain’s Lord David Steel, said polling reflected that South Africa was becoming a normal country. “There is a very big contrast in what was a liberation election and this one which is much more like a normal election held in any country, with healthy debate between the […]
A SENIOR Mozambican police officer has been sentenced to three months imprisonment for illegally detaining a journalist, state radio reported on Tuesday. Severino Charles, police commander of Chiure district in the northern Cabo Delgado province, was Tuesday found guilty of illegally detaining journalist Fernando Quinova of the state-owned Mass Communications Institute in October last year. […]
THE President and Cabinet unanimously agreed to the nomination of Mr Justice Sandile Ngcobo to the Constitutional Court, according to a statement by the office of President Nelson Mandela. The statement responded to media reports of Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s intervention to appoint Ngcobo. Attempting to clarify the process, the statement notes that the Judicial […]
A CENSUS of the Congo-Brazzaville army came up 5,000 troops short, the army high command announced on Tuesday, saying the remaining names on the payroll represented either deserters or fictitious soldiers. The defense ministry two weeks ago ordered all officers and soldiers to barracks to allow a “complete review of personnel and equipment” with a […]
NELSPRUIT police detonated a suspicious package on Wednesday evening. It was not immediately known is the package was a bomb. An earlier bomb threat outside a primary school in the Mpumalanga town of Lydenburg turned out to be nothing more than a package in the trash that police dogs mistook for a bomb.