A two-week strike that crippled operations at a major bus company was called off on Tuesday following a settlement agreement between the company and the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union. ”In terms of the agreement, all employees will resume their normal duties tomorrow [Wednesday],” Autopax spokesperson Trechia Arlow said on Tuesday.
Five members of a British embassy group missing for two weeks in a remote part of Ethiopia have been released and are safe and well, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said on Tuesday.
Negotiations between the Richtersveld community and the government on an out-of-court land-claim settlement are back on track, according to community leader Willem Diergaardt. He was speaking after a 45-minute meeting on Tuesday morning with Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin, in the minister’s Cape Town office.
There is R600-million for apartheid victims who appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that has not been paid out as reparations, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Tuesday. DA justice spokesperson Sheila Camerer said it was unacceptable for the Department of Justice and Constitutional Communication to turn a blind eye to people’s suffering.
Sudan on Tuesday rejected as invalid the findings of a United Nations human rights mission that accused Khartoum of orchestrating and taking part in gross violations in Darfur. Sudan’s Justice Minister Mohamed Ali Elmardi also told the UN’s Human Rights Council, which had dispatched the mission, that the humanitarian situation in Sudan’s vast western region was ”much more stable now”.
Eight babies removed from a filthy cellar in Orange Grove in Johannesburg — where they had allegedly been abandoned by their teenage mothers — are back with their mothers. Johannesburg General Hospital spokesperson Lungi Mvumvu said on Tuesday that the babies had not been admitted but examined as outpatients.
A police sergeant inexperienced in murder scenes told the Cape High Court on Tuesday of his shock at finding the corpse of estate agent Andre Weitz bludgeoned to death in a duplex in Cape Town. Bernard van Zyl (28), Weitz’s former romantic partner, is alleged to have attacked Weitz with an axe in June 2004.
An assault case against the kwaito star known to his fans as Mandoza was postponed in the Randburg Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday, police said. Glen Nonkonyana (30) laid a charge at the Kliptown police station on Monday, alleging that Mandoza had assaulted him at a flat in Ferndale in Randburg late on Saturday, police said.
The Labour Ministry on Tuesday accused the Democratic Alliance (DA) of purposely misrepresenting the facts about Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana’s availability to answer questions in Parliament. A DA statement on Monday listed Mdladlana as being among ministers who evaded parliamentary questions.
Royalty payments are tax deductible under the Income Tax Act, the Supreme Court of Appeal held on Tuesday, upholding an appeal by BP Southern Africa against a judgement of the Cape Town Income-Tax Special Court. The case was about the BP trademarks, colour schemes, designs and symbols that BP Southern Africa has used since 1959.