What started weeks ago with Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) activists occupying the Human Rights Commission offices in Cape Town may end with the pressure group taking President Thabo Mbeki to court in an attempt to get Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang fired. The lobby group says there are several legal avenues that could be explored if the president were to be brought before the court.

As the sympathetic examiner handed me my Mensa IQ test results, I had a sense of how the Pakistani cricket team must feel about Aussie umpire Darrell Hair. The difference, of course, was that the examiner wasn’t the stupid one. A few days earlier I had attended a local get-together of this international organisation for people with an IQ in the top 2% of the population, writes Charles Leonard.

United States President George Bush demanded that there be ”consequences” for Iran after it ignored a United Nations Security Council deadline on Thursday to suspend part of its nuclear programme. Washington wants UN sanctions imposed on Tehran as quickly as possible, but the Security Council is seriously divided.

A document presented to President Thabo Mbeki by the Eastern Cape provincial executive committee has painted a grim picture of leadership paralysis, political infighting and rebellion in the ranks of the African National Congress that could thwart the crucial provincial conference later this month. ”The ANC has never experienced such high levels of ill-discipline, defiance [and] infighting within members of the ANC,” the document says.