Bitterly cold weather around the country is likely to result in snow on higher ground, hail and sleet in the interior and rough seas in the Cape, meteorologists said on Friday. The National Forecasting Centre said the central and eastern parts of the country are being invaded by very cold weather.
The world needs a new breed of prosecutor and investigator to deal with the challenges of transnational organised crime, the special adviser to National Director of Public Prosecutions Vusi Pikoli said on Friday. Kalyani Pillay was speaking in Cape Town at a PricewaterhouseCoopers conference on economic crime in Africa.
Vodacom was up and running again on Friday afternoon after subscribers could not make or receive phone calls earlier. ”After extensive investigation Vodacom has identified that incoming data received on interconnecting links from the Cell C network appears to have disrupted the Vodacom network,” Vodacom said.
Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani promised that Tehran would cooperate with United Nations inspectors, in a meeting late on Thursday in Vienna with UN atomic agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei. ”The discussion was that of course Iran is continuing its cooperation with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency],” Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh said.
Nigerian authorities on Friday allocated two lucrative oil blocks to companies based in the Niger Delta in a bid to douse tensions in the oil-rich restive southern region. Two oil firms — Cleanwaters Consortium and Niger Delta United — were allocated operating production licences 289 and 233 respectively during a bidding exercise.
With the international release of <i>The Da Vinci Code</i>, we ask Oxford don Peter Conrad to unpick the meaning behind the global obsession and we speak to the movie’s villain Paul Bettany about God and violence.
The Bush administration is poised to abandon its policy of regime change for North Korea by opening negotiations on a peace treaty at the same time as it tries to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons programme, foreign policy experts said on Thursday.
South Africa’s road network, conservatively estimated to be worth R550-billion, is deteriorating at an alarming rate according to the South African Road Federation (Sarf). Sarf says that the under-funding of road maintenance over the past 25 years is the prime cause of the problem.
A leader of an Islamist group blamed for a spate of deadly attacks in tourist resorts in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula over the past two years was killed in an explosion on Friday, a security source said. Arafat Ouda Ali died as a device he tried to hurl at security forces closing in on his hideout on a Rafah farm exploded in his face.
Arch-rival Horn of Africa neighbours Ethiopia and Eritrea blamed each other on Friday for the failure of talks aimed at ending the deadlock over their tense border that many fear could spark a new war. The two countries accused each other of holding to longstanding inflexible positions even as mediators attempted to negotiate a breakthrough.