OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Wednesday 7.00pm. A SQUAD of South African security policemen were stopped in a roadblock en route to plant a bomb in the African National Congress headquarters in London in 1982. This came to light during the testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty hearing where eight policemen are applying for […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Wednesday 10.30pm NIGERIA’S military ruler, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, left Britain on Wednesday confident that his political reform programme will soon lead to the removal of sanctions against his country by the European Union. The union imposed limited sanctions — including travel restrictions on government officials — in 1995 after late General […]

JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Wednesday 7.50pm. Mpumalanga’s provincial executive council refused to grill the province’s finance MEC, Jacques Modipane, or other top politicians about their links with ousted parks chief, Alan Gray, for a second time on Wednesday. An earlier scheduled showdown between the executive council and Modipane was cancelled last week after the council […]

JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Tuesday 3.30pm. FOUR board directors on Mpumalanga’s Parks Board (MPB) are threatening the province’s environmental affairs MEC, Fish Mahlalela, with a multi-million-rand libel suit. MPB board director Rupert Lorimer said on Tuesday that Mahlalela’s dismissal of the board earlier in the day implied that its directors were either dishonest or implicated […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 3.30pm. THE National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa on Tuesday said that the second one-day sympathy strike in support of a three-week old strike in the motor retail industry was a raging success. In the Eastern Cape, the Delta Motor Corporation said it has been forced to close its […]

MICHAEL METELITS, Johannesburg | Monday 5.00pm. MOST markets moved in thin trading Monday, as the Jewish New Year and the impending public holiday on Thursday kept volumes down. In a local trading vacuum, international pressures directed market activity, and the news out of Asia was bad, as the Nikkei plunged over 350 points and other […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Monday 10.00pm. A ZAMBIAN high court judge who is trying 77 coup plot suspects has threatend to release all the accused if the Zambian government fails to improve their prison conditions, Zambian press reports said on Monday. Prosecution lawyers were on Saturday ordered by Judge Japhet Banda to arrange improvement of […]

JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Tuesday 3.30pm. THE Mpumalanga government on Tuesday ordered disgraced provincial parks board chief Alan Gray to resign, and fired the entire board of the Mpumalanga Parks Board. Gray, who reportedly accepted the order on Tuesday morning, has however been promised a sizeable severance package and will not be subjected to a […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 4.00pm. THE military intervention in Lesotho is meant to help a lasting political solution, and not to impose a military solution, acting President Mangosutho Buthelezi told Parliament on Tuesday. “The aim of the intervention is to restore stability as quickly as possible and to withdraw from the Kingdom of Lesotho […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday 9.30pm. FORMER apartheid security policemen planned to shackle South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo to a steel ring in a basement on a farm outside Pretoria, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission amnesty committe heard on Tuesday. Craig Willaimson, a former apartheid spy who has applied for amnesty for his […]