Wits University’s new policy of imposing a 10% levy on the income earned by academics for private work could benefit them, said Aubrey Blecher of the Wits Academic Staff Association this week. Blecher said having a large institution such as Wits at their side, rather than trying to negotiate as individuals with the corporate world, could work to the advantage of academics.
A belligerent President Robert Mugabe is placing conditions for the lifting of international sanctions first, before any dialogue or planned visit by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Mugabe is expected to meet Annan on the sidelines of the African Union summit in Gambia this week.
Controversial draft legislation aimed at overhauling the structure of the judiciary has been shelved after the intervention of President Thabo Mbeki. Senior government and parliamentary officials say formal consideration of the proposed laws has been suspended, and will not begin again until they are redrafted.
Deep changes to the judicial system are urgently needed. Just about no one disputes that. Too many relics of the apartheid and colonial past persist in the structure of provincial divisions. And the absence of rigorous, credible and transparent mechanisms to hold judges accountable for their conduct is proving increasingly problematic for the administration of justice.
South Africa has allocated nearly $50-million to win the site bid for the world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array. The country is vying against Australia, Argentina and China to host this prestigious European Commission-funded science project.
Sexuality is still a taboo topic in many societies — and the taboo is even greater for people with disabilities. "Parents and relatives believe that a woman with a disability should not engage in sex," says Gladys Charowa, founder member and director of Harare’s Disabled Women Support Organisation.
<i>’Mhla kwahamba abelungu kulelizwe, amakhafula ayothi ‘Basi’ lapha kithi"</i> (when all the whites are gone from this country, kaffirs will say ‘Baas’ to us — the Mkhizes). I was about eight when I first heard one of my uncles make this bold declaration. UBab’ Omdala uMlamuli is now almost 90 years old and over the past 23 years, he has repeatedly assured me that his prophecy will indeed come true.
It is not yet quite a year since Israel withdrew its forces and dismantled illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip, though there has always been a grim inevitability about the offensive — codenamed Summer Rain — that Ehud Olmert unleashed this week to try to free a soldier abducted by Palestinian fighters.
Radio Marco Zero is a tiny radio station in Amapa, one of Brazil’s remotest Amazon states. Yet its few thousand listeners in the state capital, Macapa, have for the past month been able to hear exclusive hourly updates about the Brazilian national team. ”In the 254 years since Macapa was founded, no one has ever had the chance to come to a World Cup,” says Tarciso Franco, one of the station’s two journalists in Germany.
A tip-off from Virgin Atlantic led to the price-fixing inquiry into British Airways (BA), it has emerged, marking a return to the hostile relations that existed between the two airlines during the ”dirty tricks” campaign of the 1990s. BA was plunged into crisis after it said that the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading and the Justice Department in the United States are conducting a joint investigation into allegations of price-fixing.