For decades Samy Swasebard has been wandering around Europe, peddling pots and pans. He always returns to Strasbourg, where he has lived for 40 years. ”This is my favourite place, the place I call home,” says the 72-year-old, a retired Teflon salesperson. ”And if it wasn’t for Europe, between them the Germans and the French would have destroyed this place.”
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Year-on-year new-car sales kept on declining last month although total vehicle sales were up, the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa (Naamsa) said on Monday. Naamsa said 36 041 cars were sold in March — compared to 37 496 in the same month last year. This represented a decline of 3,9% or 1 455 units.
Zimbabwean police have asked a special police branch to maintain order during Tuesday’s two-day general strike called by the country’s main labour body, a spokesperson said. ”The National Reaction Force … will be deployed in all problem areas to ensure that there is law and order during this illegal stayaway,” police spokesperson Wayne Bvudzijena said.
The Department of Environmental Affairs said it will appoint independent auditors to examine the circumstances around the sale by public auction of one of its marine patrol vessels for about R300Â 000. ”The audit will be completed this week,” department spokesperson Blessing Manale told the South African Press Association on Monday.
About two hundred members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) at a Murray and Roberts plant handed over a memorandum of grievances to company management in Marikana outside Rustenburg on Monday. Workers want the company to implement a wage agreement reached last year.
Western Cape speaker Shaun Byneveldt on Monday announced the names of members of a multiparty committee that will decide whether provincial Premier Ebrahim Rasool misled the legislature. The six-person committee will be chaired by his deputy, Yousuf Gabru. Byneveldt’s office said in a statement that the committee would begin work after the present two-week recess.
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Detectives leading the Bob Woolmer murder inquiry said on Monday they are studying the possibility that poison was used to incapacitate the burly Pakistan cricket coach before he was strangled. Jamaican police Deputy Commissioner Mark Shields said detectives were exploring whether the powerfully built Woolmer was drugged before being murdered.
In a defeat for the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a United States government agency has the power under the clean-air law to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions that spur global warming. The ruling came in one of the most important environmental cases to reach the Supreme Court in decades. It marked the first high court decision in a case involving global warming.
Drunken South African fans hurled racist abuse at sevens rugby coach Paul Treu after his side lost against Samoa in the Hong Kong Sevens, the Daily News reported on Monday. Its website said the fans were apparently angry because only one white player was in the starting line-up for the semifinal match.