”He used to say, ‘Old men start the wars and send the young men off to fight them,”’ Ross Moody recalls of his brother Craig, who died 24 years ago while completing a mandatory two-year stint in the army. Craig was among tens of thousands of South African Defence Force conscripts whose only other choice would have been to serve a four-year prison term as a conscientious objector.
The papers are plump with stories on the continuing contest between the president and the popular figure he once chose as his number two. Some articles accuse the country’s boss of abusing state organs to stop this man from filling his shoes. Column inches debate whether the ”victim” has made irresponsible utterances and assess his chances against a protégé of the president.
![]()
The International Cricket Council (ICC) has teamed up with UNAids, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the Caribbean Broadcast Media Partnership at the Cricket World Cup 2007 to highlight the situation of children and young people living with and affected by HIV/Aids.
We have a difficult past as South Africans. We’ve had conflict for 360 years, possibly more, and this was so because colonialism had to find its full sway and that took easily 200 years, followed by another 150 years of conflict, essentially over gold and diamonds. And in that process many people’s lives were trampled upon and we ended up with what I will call a "last fling", writes Dikgang Moseneke.
The government is looking at underground storage of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations as a way of reducing the millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases the plants belch into the country’s atmosphere each year, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk said on Wednesday.
A 30-member environmental management inspection team, the so-called ”Green Scorpions”, is set to descend on the Foskor Plant in Richards Bay on Thursday to effect a compliance inspection, according to the KwaZulu-Natal department of agriculture and environmental affairs.
European and Asian stocks dropped on Wednesday after Wall Street chalked its second-biggest point decline in four years and rattled already nervous markets worldwide. The tumble came just as international markets were recovering from sharp declines earlier this month.
African leaders, for so long reluctant to speak out about the crisis in Zimbabwe, are finally running out of patience with President Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, suffered a suspected skull fracture, doctors reported on Wednesday after what lawyers and other activists said were savage beatings while in police custody.
Billionaire George Soros pledged -million on Wednesday to fight a deadly strain of tuberculosis in Africa. Since an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) was identified in South Africa last year, health experts have repeatedly issued dire warnings about the disease’s spread across the continent.
Black South Africans are six times more likely to get infected with the HI virus than other race groups, the Health Department told an Aids conference on the government’s National Strategic Plan for Aids and Sexually Transmitted Infections 2007-2011 in Johannesburg on Wednesday.