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/ 2 November 2007
Police seized cocaine valued at about R50-million at OR Tambo International Airport on Friday. Spokesperson Captain Dennis Adriao said the drugs had been found on a plane from Brazil. He said the bust brought the number of drug finds at the airport to four in the space of three weeks.
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/ 2 November 2007
Africa’s state-owned oil firms are taking a bigger role in the rush to tap the continent’s energy resources and threatening to upstage the Western majors who have dominated exploration and drilling for decades. Governments from Luanda to Lagos are pushing for greater control and laying down increasingly stringent rules for the international firms.
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/ 2 November 2007
Aid workers are planning to travel to Chad’s western border with Sudan to try to determine the exact background of 103 children at the centre of a child abduction row, the United Nations Children’s Fund said on Friday. The group is aiming to meet village and community leaders around the Chadian towns of Adre and Tine.
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/ 2 November 2007
Six world powers meet on Friday to discuss imposing a third round of sanctions on Iran because of its refusal to stop enriching uranium, which they suspect could be used to build nuclear weapons. Talks among top officials from the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany were due to start in the morning and last several hours.
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/ 2 November 2007
One of the witnesses recalled in the case of former spy boss Billy Masetlha on Friday corroborated evidence that the inspector general of intelligence was sent a report — which he had asked for — on September 30 2005. Although Masetlha’s former personal assistant Nokuthula Motshwane could not be in court, she gave evidence through an affidavit.
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/ 2 November 2007
Fernando Alonso’s stormy year with McLaren came to a shuddering halt on Friday with the announcement that the Spaniard was leaving the team just one year into a three-year contract. The deposed world champion will quit the British team immediately even though his current contract had two years to run until the end of the 2009 season.
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/ 2 November 2007
The dollar struck a new all-time low against the euro on Friday as technical factors offset positive United States jobs data, dealers said. In European trade, the euro rose to a record $1,4525. It later fell back to $1,4484, compared with $1,4422 in New York late on Thursday.
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/ 2 November 2007
The Department of Home Affairs is forging ahead with plans to introduce a smart-card identification system, Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said on Friday. ”It is clear to us that we have to move in this direction as quickly as possible,” she told a media briefing at Parliament.
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/ 2 November 2007
AngloGold Ashanti shut one of its larger mines in South Africa on Friday after a miner was killed in a rockfall as a miners’ strike to protest against the spate of mine deaths in the country loomed. AngloGold, the world’s third-biggest gold producer, shut its TauTona mine after the worker died in the early hours of Friday.
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/ 2 November 2007
President Thabo Mbeki devoted a large part of his speech to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Friday to criticising the behaviour and ownership of the media. Speaking in Pniel, outside Stellenbosch, where the NCOP was holding a provincial sitting, he emphasised that the government has ”absolutely no intention to limit press freedom”.