The disappearance of dozens of firearms issued to the Durban metro police department has blown wide open the haphazard management of arms and ammunition by municipal police services. State-issued firearms have been used in robberies and hijackings in Durban and surrounds, fuelling fears that criminals are buying guns from corrupt police officers.
Some may wonder how, as a man of the left and Israel’s peace camp, I can at the same time be a member of a government now fighting a war in Lebanon. The answer is the same one Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson would have given: when your very existence is under threat, you have the right to defend yourself, writes Isaac Herzog.
When the De Beers black economic empowerment deal was announced last year, Cheryl Carolus could be described as not being "one of the usual suspects". Not now. In a short time Carolus, former ambassador to London and darling of those nostalgic for the optimistic non-racialism of the United Democratic Front, has become a firm BEE favourite.
"There’s a lot of excitement and anticipation here; there’s a buzz," electoral observer Ilona Tip tells me on her cellphone from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) capital, Kinshasa. "It reminds me of South Africa in 1994. The stakes are also fairly high and in the conflict since 1998, 3,5-million people have died."
Five years ago, in an article titled "Scent of the plague", published in the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> (June 29 2001), I summarised my experiences as a doctor working in a health service faced with the plague of HIV infection among children in South Africa. I wrote about how difficult it was to break the news of a deadly infection to the parents, whose likely HIV status was revealed by the illness of their baby.
To avert a chaotic collapse of four years of global trade talks, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation Pascal Lamy, announced recently a slightly more dignified "suspension”. A postmortem may be premature — in the words of the Indian Trade Minister, Kamal Nath, the round is not dead, merely "between intensive care and the crematorium”.
Healthcare workers Initiative: Weak healthcare systems and a shortage of healthcare workers are undermining efforts to deliver anti-retroviral drugs to Africa, Kevin de Cock, director of the HIV/Aids Department at the World Health Organisation (WHO), said last week.
Fica is a four-letter word for anyone who has had financial dealings in the past three years. Consumers have had to provide certified copies of a set of documents for each account with every financial institution, the information required varying between institutions.
I woke at dawn and leapt out of bed in my usual energetic way. As I started to move around I wondered why my legs felt so stiff. I had promised to start going to gym, but had put off the evil moment repeatedly, with all sorts of valid and tear jerking excuses. But the fact is that I could not blame a new gym regime for the stiffness in my muscles.
South African cellphone users can finally start getting used to paying for the actual airtime they use now that the leading players are offering per-second billing on some (Vodacom, MTN and Cell-C) or all (Virgin) of their packages. But this is only for cellphone calls to other cellphones or landlines.