The Public Service Accountability Monitor has called for the immediate suspension of Eastern Cape housing minister Neo Moerane-Mamase following her arrest on Friday morning for corruption. Mamase and her husband, Max Mamase, were arrested on Friday morning by the joint anti-corruption task team.
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe on Friday urged his supporters to vote for his party’s candidates in crunch upcoming parliamentary elections regardless of any of its shortcomings. ”It doesn’t matter that the party may have failed to fulfil certain promises, such as employment,” Mugabe said.
A three-year-old girl was raped and murdered at the Kwa-Masiza hostel in Sebokeng on Saturday morning, Vaal Rand police said. The child was murdered after the mother (23) left her alone to visit her boyfriend at about 3am, Superintendent Maria Mazibuko said.
The main topic of sartorial debate inside the courtroom at the Michael Jackson trial came not with the king of pop’s unlikely arrival in a pair of blue pyjama bottoms, but a few days earlier. The whisper rolled through the 30 or so reporters squeezed into the small municipal court as Jackson strode in on the sixth day of the trial.
At the same time that Sergeant Kevin Benderman’s unit was called up for a second tour in Iraq with the Third Infantry Division, two soldiers tried to kill themselves and another had a relative shoot him in the leg. Seventeen went awol or ran off to Canada, and Benderman defied nine years of military training and followed his conscience.
Washington’s nomination of Paul Wolfowitz as the World Bank’s next president has triggered an outcry among the bank’s staff, who have demanded the right to have a say in his confirmation, it emerged on Friday. The staff association has met with the bank’s executives to voice its concerns after it was swamped with complaints.
The first European Union citizen to be accused of involvement in genocide appeared in court on Friday in The Netherlands in a case that is being closely watched by war-crimes experts and human rights activists. Frans van Anraat is a Dutch businessman who is alleged to have helped Saddam Hussein to gas the Kurds of Halabja in 1988.
The decision by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) this week to close M-Net’s two-hour open time diminishes competition in the sector, M-Net said on Friday. ”Closing open time will force M-Net to re-evaluate the programming it currently schedules in the two-hour slot,” M-Net chief executive Glen Marques said.
An outbreak of an unidentified haemorrhagic fever has claimed the lives of 87 people in northern Angola over the past four months, health ministry spokesperson Carlos Alberto said on Friday. The ministry is awaiting the results of samples sent to Senegal and the United States to identify the strain of the fever.
Former president Nelson Mandela flew into the South African town of George on Friday to talk with local people about HIV/Aids issues ahead of the second star-studded 46664 Aids benefit concert, organised by his global fund-raising and awareness campaign. The concert is scheduled to take place on a fairway at the Fancourt Golf Estate.