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 […]

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.

THE current global financial crisis calls for a complete rethink of the world’s economic systems, President Nelson Mandela said.

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Goma | Monday 9.30pm. DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo President Laurent Kabila has named a commission to review a report on constitutional change. Kabila, who hand-picked the members of the commission himself, said he was forced to abandon plans to present the study to parliament by “exceptional wartime circumstances”. The 12-man institutional reform commission […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Monday 4.00pm. THE two members of Parliament who engaged in a fist fight on the floor of the National Assembly last Thursday were suspended from Parliament on Monday. Eastern Cape National Party leader Dr Manie Schoeman, who has admitted to landing the first blow, was suspended from Parliament for five […]