This may be China’s ”year of Africa”, but as Premier Wen Jiabao toured the continent signing resource deals and promising development assistance, considerable ambivalence was evident in South Africa’s response. Anxiety over the competitiveness of the domestic manufacturing sector in the face of China’s extraordinary export performance jostles for space in the minds of policy-makers.
South Africa’s communications regulator has been rocked by allegations that councillors regularly violate the Icasa Act by participating in activities of stakeholders in the Information and Communication Technology sector. Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) councillor Mamodupi Mohlala included the allegation in a letter of response to an inquiry about her work.
About 100 families were left homeless on Monday morning after a fire destroyed their shacks in Alexandra, northern Johannesburg. Emergency services spokesperson Malcolm Midgley said residents of the shacks at the corner of 8th Street and Selbourne Avenue had tried in vain to put out the fire that was raging through the settlement.
Somalis marked their 46th anniversary of independence quietly on Monday in Mogadishu, fearing the Islamic militants who control their capital would frown on celebrations. In past years, public events were held in Mogadishu and other towns to mark independence day.
The world’s largest steel group Mittal Steel on Monday denied that it would sell its 52% stake in Mittal Steel South Africa as part of the deal to merge with world’s second largest steel maker Arcelor. "We firmly deny this rumour and it couldn’t be further from the truth," said Mittal Steel spokesperson Paul Weigh in a statement.
Voters in the poverty stricken West African nation of Mauritania overwhelmingly approved a new Constitution in a weekend referendum, Interior Ministry officials said on Monday. Officials said that based on early returns they believed that 80% to 90% voted on Sunday to approve the Constitution.
The Algerian army on Sunday killed 19 armed suspected Islamists, newspapers reported on Monday. The army, backed by police, used heavy artillery and rockets fired from helicopters in an operation against suspected Islamists in the Edough mountains near Annaba, 600km east of Algiers.
Venus Williams admitted on Sunday that it will be a strange experience when she opens her title defence at Wimbledon this year without sister Serena by her side. Serena is absent with a knee injury and has played just four matches since last year’s US Open, three of them at the Australian Open in January.
Passengers running about in the nude and having sex outdoors were common on a cruise-liner where an Australian woman died of an overdose of a date-rape drug. The night manager of the cruise on the Pacific Sky in September 2002, Kathleen Taylor, told the Glebe Coroner’s Court in Sydney that she would often have to separate couples caught engaging in sex acts in public.
Tinashe Rioga, the 21-year old Zimbabwean accused of trying to hijack a South African Airways domestic flight from Cape Town on June 17, appeared briefly in the Bellville Magistrate’s Court on Monday. The case was postponed for a bail application on July 5, and he was remanded in the Bellville South police station cells.