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 […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 4.00pm. THE incidence of ethnic murder is rising in northwest Rwanda and is stoking conflict in the volatile Democratic Republic of Congo, human rights organisation African Rights said on Tuesday. The organisation warned that the ethnic killings could destabilise the region, and that conflict in the DRC, led by Tutsi […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 11.00am. PUNDITS expect South African junior flyweight Hawk Makepula to be South Africa’s first professional boxer to take a championship on the hallowed ground of New York’s Madison Square Gardens, on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning SA time). Makepula will be fighting Rafael Torres of the Dominican Republic for the World […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 4.00pm. EFFORTS by United Nations special envoy Issa Diallo to meet with Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi are being thwarted by the government’s stated inability to guarantee his safety, leaving him effectively stalled in the capital, Luanda. The country’s peace accords negotiated four years ago in Lusaka, Zambia, are threatened […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 11.30pm AN ESTIMATED 300 Botswanan Defence Force troops have arrived in Lesotho. Elijah Legwaila, senior permanent secretary in the office of Botswana President Festus Mogae confirmed the deployment and said: “Our troops arrived in Lesotho [on Tuesday] and will remain there until the situation is stabilised. The situation in Lesotho […]

LEONARD NDZHUKULA, Delmas | Tuesday 9.30pm. THE country’s top criminal psychologist, police deputy director Micki Pistorius, has been sent to the small Mpumalanga farming town of Delmas this week to speed up investigations into a suspected serial killer in the region. Police have recovered three severed heads and three headless bodies, not neccessarily matching, from […]

President Nelson Mandela has vowed to support United States President Bill Clinton even if everybody else deserts him.

MICHAEL METELITS, Johannesburg | Tuesday 6.00pm. DESPITE the release Tuesday of domestic consumer price information from Statistics South Africa, formerly the Central Statistical Service, international trends again dominated the JSE and other local markets. Those trends were positive, as a number of markets bounced back from Monday’s carnage. The CPI 12-month rate was 7,6%, which […]

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 […]

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 […]