<i>Mail & Guardian</i> editor Ferial Haffajee took top honours at the MTN Women in the Media 2006 awards ceremony in Johannesburg on Friday, claiming the overall award. The awards honour women in the South African media industry who have excelled in their careers.
Creating jobs without damaging the environment was the only way to guarantee workers’ livelihoods, a conference in Johannesburg heard on Friday. About 80 trade union leaders from 22 African countries were meeting with environmentalists for a two-day conference to examine connections between poverty and environmental damage and how these affected workers.
The South African Cabinet has approved the establishment of the South African Space Agency as an institutional vehicle for the coordination and implementation of South Africa’s national space, science and technology programmes. In a statement on Friday the Cabinet said the agency would conduct ”long-term planning and implementation of space-related activities”.
Four people, including three police officers, are now known to have died and about 20 injured in rioting ahead of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) landmark elections, police said on Friday. Witnesses had earlier reported that one man had died in the violence, which occurred on Thursday outside a stadium where leading presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba was holding his final campaign rally.
A new tax withholding system for non-resident entertainers and sportspeople comes into effect on Tuesday, the South African Revenue Services (Sars) announced on Friday. Previously foreign entertainers and sportspeople were taxed the same as South African residents, but their short stays in the country made this impractical, Sars said.
Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika has suspended the head of the national graft-fighting agency just hours after the Southern African nation’s previous president was charged with stealing aid money. Wa Mutharika suspended Gustave Kaliwo, the head of the Anti-Corruption Bureau on ”disciplinary grounds”, a brief statement by the president’s office said.
Somalia’s Minister of Constitutional and Federal Affairs Abdalla Derrow Issak was shot dead on Friday by an unknown gunman in the temporary seat of the transitional government, a relative said. Issak was killed as he left the mosque after Friday prayers in Baidoa, about 250km north-west of the capital, Mogadishu, the relative added.
Russia signed a ,9-billion arms deal with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela on Thursday, risking a confrontation with the United States, which has imposed an arms embargo on the South American country. The outspoken Venezuelan president also told reporters in Moscow that his country could develop its own nuclear programme.
Danes are the happiest people in the world, according to a new survey published on Friday that measures health, wealth, education, sense of identity and the aesthetic quality of the landscape. The survey follows another earlier this month that said the tiny South Pacific Ocean archipelago of Vanuatu was the happiest country on Earth.
The world’s largest diamond miner, De Beers, on Friday said it expects the outlook for the global rough diamond market for the second half of 2006 to be difficult. "It has been a testing time over the past six months," De Beers chairperson Nicky Oppenheimer said during a results teleconference.