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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]