At last — leadership from President Thabo Mbeki on a crisis that, by his own admission, has gripped the ruling African National Congress for two years. He told his party’s warring factions to stop putting petty turf battles before the real work of development. He asked what ANC branches were doing to ensure the provision of decent sanitation and adequate water supplies.
The Democratic Alliance has officially asked Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Brigitte Mabandla to release a two-year-old report on compensation for crime victims. DA spokesperson Dianne Kohler-Barnard has also promised to invoke the Access to Information Act should Mabandla fail to comply.
The manne with timeshares on the West Coast near the Visdorp are selling. Their logic is simple. Nobody was suspended when Koeberg broke. Alec Erwin still hasn’t found somewhere to pin his loose bolt, and hasn’t had to prove his allegations. So just exactly what did five employees have to do to get suspended this week?
On Sunday, next to the gutted and destroyed house in Qana, seven bodies lay covered with bedsheets, a blanket and a prayer mat. One small arm stretched out from under the sheets; thin, the arm of a little girl, a piece of cloth like a bracelet wrapped around the wrist. As bodies were loaded on the stretcher, I saw another dead girl, writes Ghaith Abdul-Ahad.
”This is a machine for walking like an Egyptian. This one crunches apples like Catherine Deneuve. And that’s a spit for roasting Joan of Arc.” In its 100-year existence, Paris’s majestic Grand Palais museum has never hosted anything like it — a battery of barmy Heath Robinson contraptions that clang, creak, explode and generally make people laugh.
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Four thousand train commuters were arrested for various offences during a month-long operation, mainly by police reservists in the Gauteng Metrorail system, police said on Wednesday. Superintendent Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said: ”Several people were arrested for possession and dealing in drugs …”
During his address at the launch of the Independent Regulatory Board for Auditors on Wednesday, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel highlighted the need for a better life, free of fraud and corruption for men and women and the role a truly independent auditor’s board will play in this regard.
The Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) is consulting the public on changing the apartheid-era names of some streets in Randburg, JDA head Lael Bethlehem said on Wednesday. She said Randburg was dominated by apartheid-era names and, in particular, Hendrik Verwoerd and Hans Strijdom drives had to be renamed.
Hezbollah fired more rockets into Israel on Wednesday than on any previous day of the 22-day-old war, after helicopter-borne commandos attacked guerrilla targets in Israel’s deepest raid into Lebanon. Air strikes in support of the helicopter raid in the Hezbollah stronghold of Baalbek in north-eastern Lebanon killed 19 people, including four children.