The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has written a letter to the group chief executive of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), asking him if there was any truth to reports that his corporation had banned four top political commentators.
The South African rand was hovering just below the R7,10 per dollar early on Wednesday morning in quiet trade. While the rand’s weakness appeared to be overdone, there was no sign of a recovery, currency traders said. At 8.42am, the rand was bid at R7,0678 per dollar from an overnight close of R7,0600.
A man accused of making death threats against two men suspected of the murders of actor Brett Goldin and his designer friend Richard Bloom appeared briefly in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday. The accused is the alleged leader of the Cape Town gang known as the Americans.
Helen Suzman, a former Member of Parliament and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, was hospitalised after she fell and hurt her hip at her home in Illovo, Johannesburg, media reports said on Wednesday. The 88-year-old veteran anti-apartheid activist was reported to be ”groggy” after undergoing surgery on Monday.
Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor, once one of Africa’s most feared warlords, spent his first morning in detention in The Hague on Wednesday after being flown in to face war crimes charges over some of the worst atrocities committed in Africa.
The tortured bodies of two United States soldiers were recovered in Iraq on Tuesday, after the two privates had been captured last week in an insurgent attack. An Iraqi official said they were ”killed in a barbaric way”, and an Islamist website claiming the killing for the al-Qaeda group in Iraq suggested they had been beheaded.
The tiny screen of an iPod might not seem the best medium for enjoying the sweeping landscapes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or the breathtaking action scenes from Titanic. But such appears to be the goal of Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, who is in negotiations with most of Hollywood’s big studios to make feature films available for download via the firm’s online music software, iTunes.
Chinua Achebe is revered across continents as a founder of the modern African novel in English, reports Maya Jaggi in London.
He used to be one of the stars in your classroom, an energetic and hard worker who always achieved top marks. But suddenly his performance slumped; he is aloof, arrives late at school, visits the toilet endlessly, is untidy and rebellious. You sense there is a problem, but you just cannot put your finger on it. "Dig deeper," urged Captain Jan Combrinck, "as these are some of the tell-tale signs of drug abuse."
Guy Delva’s family do not like travelling in the same car as him. They worry that one of the many enemies that Haiti’s high-profile reporter has made in the course of a 20-year career may choose the moment to exact a violent revenge against a man who receives regular death threats. In countries such as Haiti, Colombia and the Philippines, journalists face threats and violence on a daily basis