The Western Cape provincial working committee of the African National Congress has temporarily suspended Kannaland Municipality Mayor Jeffrey Donson as an ANC member, pending a hearing. According to reports, Donson, who moonlights as a DJ, was confronted by taxpayers over the alleged use of public money to fund this other career.
South Africa’s neighbours who formed an anti-apartheid alliance and sheltered black liberation groups bear deep scars from a backlash by the former white racist regime in Pretoria whose stint in power ended a decade ago.
Western Cape Premier and New National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk has emerged as the most popular premier candidate in that province in a Markinor poll conducted in January/February. In KwaZulu-Natal, the African National Congress’s top-ranking candidate for the legislature, S’bu Ndebele, won the popularity stake in the poll.
Special Report: Elections 2004
South African producer prices for all commodities fell by 1% in the 12 months to the end of February from a 1,4% decline for the 12 months to the end of January, Statistics South Africa said on Thursday. On the month, the PPI was up 0,5%, compared with no change in January.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu visited an inmate on Texas’s death row on Wednesday, saying it would be ”one of the greatest tragedies” if the man was executed and describing capital punishment as an ”absurdity that brutalises society”.
The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) is considering how the International Transport Workers’ Federation could help its strike against Equity Aviation, a statement said on Wednesday. Further negotiations last week at the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration were fruitless.
South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is disappointed by a pharmaceutical company’s response to the government’s plans to reduce drug prices in South Africa. ”Bully tactics adopted by the company will not undermine our effort to make medicines more affordable,” said Tshabalala-Msimang.
The escalating public row over the September 11 attacks reached a new pitch on Wednesday as the CIA director and a former White House counter-terrorism adviser clashed over whether the Bush administration had taken the al-Qaeda threat seriously.
The Israeli army said on Wednesday that Hassam Mohammed Hufni Abdo, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who tried to kill soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint with a belt of explosives strapped to his body, would have been the youngest Palestinian suicide bomber.
A moral panic over homosexuality in Zanzibar has prompted the island’s government to draft a law imposing life imprisonment for men convicted of gay sex. The proposed law bans same-sex marriages and sanctions a 25-year jail term for sex between men and a seven-year term for lesbians