The Land Claims Commission is refusing to allow voluntary sellers of land to appoint their own conveyancers, thus delaying the finalising of land claims, organised agriculture said on Thursday. ”In some cases documents were already at the deeds office … when the commission … withdrew the documents,” said Annelize Crosby, spokesperson for AgriSA.
The South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) has accused a division of South African Airways of racism and non-compliance with employment-equity laws. ”SAA Technical remains lily white at the top and pitch black at the bottom,” Satawu spokesperson Ronnie Mamba said on Thursday.
A South African Express Airways plane en route to Richards Bay from Johannesburg was diverted to Durban on Thursday morning due to a security alert, the carrier said. Sniffer dogs and the South African Police Service searched the plane and its passengers’ luggage after the aircraft landed at Durban International airport.
Armed only with shovels and plastic buckets, a few dozen volunteers struggled on Thursday to scrape oil-stained sand off a Beirut beach as environmental groups began the monumental task of cleaning up tonnes of oil spilt across Lebanon’s coast. ”This is the biggest environmental disaster in the Mediterranean basin, we can say that very easily,” said environmental group Green Line.
South African aviation security does not fully conform to international security standards. This much is admitted by the Civil Aviation Authority, whose website notes that a national aviation safety plan, effective since 2004, is not compliant with the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s standards.
There is no evidence of any organised group of any sort being the agent of an act of sabotage at Koeberg — which led to the shutdown of the nuclear plant earlier this year — South Africa’s Minister of Public Enterprises Alec Erwin told Parliament on Thursday. Erwin was speaking after months of controversy over remarks he made the day before the local government elections on March 1.
Emergency workers in south-west Ethiopia scrambled on Thursday to rescue thousands marooned by the latest in a series of deadly flash floods across the nation feared to have killed nearly 900 people. With 876 people in southern, eastern and northern Ethiopia already reported dead or missing, officials warned that the toll was likely to climb higher.
A typhoon churned toward Japan’s Pacific coast on Thursday with heavy rain and choppy waves, leaving three people, including a middle-aged surfer, dead or missing, officials said. Typhoon Wukong, which means Monkey King in Chinese, was moving slowly towards the southern main island of Kyushu, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
The case of convicted paedophile and serial murderer Sipho Dube was postponed on Thursday because his lawyer, Jesse Penton, had to attend to his ailing mother. Johannesburg High Court prosecutor Joanie Spies told the court that Penton’s mother was gravely ill in hospital and asked the matter to be postponed to next Tuesday.
Women police and metro officers handed a memorandum to Gauteng provincial minister of security Firoz Cachalia at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg on Thursday, pledging their support in the fight against crime. The event was part of Women’s Month celebrations.