South Africa’s manufacturing output growth quickened to an unadjusted 1,4% year-on-year in January, despite an energy crisis that knocked industry, official data showed on Wednesday. Compared with December, manufacturing production in volume terms increased, unexpectedly, by a seasonally adjusted 1,1%, Statistics South Africa said.
South Africa can become a caring society despite the racist incidents at Skielik and Reitz hostel at the University of the Free State, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in Johannesburg on Wednesday. ”We are a wonderful country with many talented people,” Tutu said in launching an exhibition honouring struggle stalwarts Walter and Albertina Sisulu.
Vitamin salesperson Matthias Rath is patently dishonest, lying whenever it suits him, the Cape High Court was told on Wednesday. ”We say that Dr Rath is, on his own showing, not an honest person,” the Treatment Action Campaign’s advocate, Geoff Budlender, said.
Police arrested an employee from the trading room of Société Générale on Wednesday as part of their investigation into an alleged rogue trading scandal at the French bank, Europe 1 radio reported. In January, Société Générale unveiled €4,9-billion of losses which the bank blamed on rogue deals carried out by Jerome Kerviel
Violence at the hands of security forces, lynchings and vigilantism against criminals, are tarnishing Mozambique’s human rights record, according to a new report by the United States. The US State Department’s country report on human rights, launched in Maputo, said there had been a rise in vigilante killings.
A court in Sicily has ruled that an accused Mafioso can be put under house arrest because he is too fat for any Italian jail. Salvatore Ferranti, who weighs 210kg, was allowed to go home after spending six months in four Italian prisons, his lawyer said, confirming a local newspaper report.
An unresolved contract dispute between appointed Springbok rugby coach Peter de Villiers and the South African Rugby Union has erupted again — and remains unresolved. This time a constitutional matter lies at the heart of the matter, De Villiers’s agent, Rian Oberholzer, said on Wednesday.
At least 20 people who were trapped in cars and homes by rising water levels during a heavy overnight downpour in Durban were rescued by the police’s search-and-rescue team. ”We used a police boat to move many people away from the Island Hotel in Isipingo and we assisted several others,” the unit’s commander, Captain Troy Alison, said on Wednesday.
As tropical cyclone Jokwe threatened the tourism districts of Vilankulo and Govuro on Wednesday, the government of Inhambane province advised business owners and residents to take precautions. The state broadcaster reported that the owners of tourism establishments near the coast were being encouraged to close their businesses.
Shops selling cannabis seeds and specialist equipment for cultivating marijuana plants face closure under proposed changes to Dutch drugs laws. Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin told Parliament he would amend laws to ban the sale of everything that ”facilitates the production of cannabis”.