Phone company Telkom is to introduce a special ”e-rate” for schools that will effectively halve the cost of their internet calls, Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri announced on Monday. Opening debate on her budget vote in the National Assembly, she said arrangements for this would be finalised between the communications and education departments over the next few months.
Fears of another war in central Africa grew on Monday as the Democratic Republic of Congo sent thousands of troops to its eastern frontier in a move branded hostile by Rwanda. Up to 10 000 government soldiers have been flown east in a rapid build-up of force which reflects renewed tension between two neighbours, who supposedly buried the hatchet last year.
The Bush administration’s efforts to contain the Abu Ghraib prison scandal were undermined on Monday when a military judge gave defence lawyers the right to call evidence from America’s most senior commanders on the interrogation techniques they authorised for use on Iraqi detainees.
Arms-exporting governments are reneging on their promises by failing to take into account the impact that the trade has on poverty, Oxfam says in a report published on Tuesday. Sales are diverting resources from areas such as health and education.
South Africa will announce its decision on the second national operator (SNO) of fixed line telephone services "before the end of August this year", said Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe- Casaburri on Monday, speaking at her Budget vote in Parliament.
South African financial services group Old Mutual has confirmed that its US asset management affiliate Pilgrim Baxter & Associates has reached agreements with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (and the Office of the New York State attorney general. The agreement settles all charges brought by these authorities.
John Schneeberger, the disgraced South African doctor jailed for sex crimes and stripped of his Canadian citizenship, on Monday lost his fight against expulsion from the country. An immigration Board hearing in Regina took less than 10 minutes to declare him an undesirable alien and order his deportation.
It was not much bigger than the four-wheel drives gathered in the dust to watch, but a small, oddly shaped white machine made history on Monday when it soared through the Californian sky to become the world’s first commercial craft in space. Piloted by South African-born Mike Melvill, the tiny rocket-cum-glider fired its way into the aerospace record books, reaching 10 times the height of a commercial jet’s cruising altitude on its one-hour, 28-minute maiden flight
British diplomats were on Monday night frantically trying to prevent a full-scale diplomatic crisis between London and Tehran after the seizure of three Royal Navy vessels in the disputed waterway between southern Iraq and Iran. Eight crew members of the three boats, sailors and marines who were part of a British team training Iraqi river police, were being held by the Iranian authorities.
One cannot escape the feeling that somehow social movements are not yet speaking for themselves in discussions about their role and importance in South Africa and the world. They have come to resemble the character Friday in JM Coetzees’s novel Foe. ”Friday has no command of words and, therefore, no defence against being reshaped, day by day in conformity with the desires of others”.