MICHAEL METELITS, Johannesburg | Tuesday 6.00pm. DESPITE the release Tuesday of domestic consumer price information from Statistics South Africa, formerly the Central Statistical Service, international trends again dominated the JSE and other local markets. Those trends were positive, as a number of markets bounced back from Monday’s carnage. The CPI 12-month rate was 7,6%, which […]

JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Tuesday 3.30pm. THE Mpumalanga government on Tuesday ordered disgraced provincial parks board chief Alan Gray to resign, and fired the entire board of the Mpumalanga Parks Board. Gray, who reportedly accepted the order on Tuesday morning, has however been promised a sizeable severance package and will not be subjected to a […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 4.00pm. THE military intervention in Lesotho is meant to help a lasting political solution, and not to impose a military solution, acting President Mangosutho Buthelezi told Parliament on Tuesday. “The aim of the intervention is to restore stability as quickly as possible and to withdraw from the Kingdom of Lesotho […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday 9.30pm. FORMER apartheid security policemen planned to shackle South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo to a steel ring in a basement on a farm outside Pretoria, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission amnesty committe heard on Tuesday. Craig Willaimson, a former apartheid spy who has applied for amnesty for his […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Monday 10.00pm. A ZAMBIAN high court judge who is trying 77 coup plot suspects has threatend to release all the accused if the Zambian government fails to improve their prison conditions, Zambian press reports said on Monday. Prosecution lawyers were on Saturday ordered by Judge Japhet Banda to arrange improvement of […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 4.00pm. THE incidence of ethnic murder is rising in northwest Rwanda and is stoking conflict in the volatile Democratic Republic of Congo, human rights organisation African Rights said on Tuesday. The organisation warned that the ethnic killings could destabilise the region, and that conflict in the DRC, led by Tutsi […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 11.00am. PUNDITS expect South African junior flyweight Hawk Makepula to be South Africa’s first professional boxer to take a championship on the hallowed ground of New York’s Madison Square Gardens, on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning SA time). Makepula will be fighting Rafael Torres of the Dominican Republic for the World […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday 4.00pm. EFFORTS by United Nations special envoy Issa Diallo to meet with Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi are being thwarted by the government’s stated inability to guarantee his safety, leaving him effectively stalled in the capital, Luanda. The country’s peace accords negotiated four years ago in Lusaka, Zambia, are threatened […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Goma | Monday 9.30pm. DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo President Laurent Kabila has named a commission to review a report on constitutional change. Kabila, who hand-picked the members of the commission himself, said he was forced to abandon plans to present the study to parliament by “exceptional wartime circumstances”. The 12-man institutional reform commission […]

THE current global financial crisis calls for a complete rethink of the world’s economic systems, President Nelson Mandela said.