Two accused in the Boeremag treason trial, Herman van Rooyen (33) and Rudi Gouws (28), both from Bela Bela in Limpopo, went missing on Wednesday afternoon, police said. ”We have launched a massive search to track down these two,” national police spokesperson Director Sally de Beer said.
A 34-year-old woman escaped rape in Bushbuckridge when she bit off her attacker’s tongue, Limpopo police said on Wednesday. The woman was walking in a street in College View on Tuesday night when the man attacked her, said Superintendent Moatshe Ngoepe.
A huge earthquake with a magnitude of 8,0 on the Richter scale hit Pacific islands in the Tonga region early on Thursday, the United States Geological Survey reported. US authorities issued a tsunami warning for New Zealand and Fiji, officials said, and a tsunami watch for the rest of the Pacific.
Rights groups in Malawi on Wednesday protested against the naming of a new highway after Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, saying he does not deserve the honour because of his poor human rights record at home. The long-time Zimbabwean leader is to start a four-day state visit to Malawi on Wednesday.
The British government announced plans on Wednesday to deport virtually all foreign convicts in a bid to defuse a scandal that threatens to damage the governing Labour Party’s results in local elections. Thursday’s elections to more than 4Â 000 local authority seats are a key test for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government.
The South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) is to boycott a pay agreement signing ceremony with Minister of Education Naledi Pandor scheduled for Thursday. ”There is nothing wrong with the agreements,” the union said. However, it blames the Department of Education for delaying the signing of the agreements.
HIV/Aids in Southern Africa is under-reported, the voices of those most affected are least heard and the gender dimensions of the pandemic are not well reflected. This is according to a study released by the Media Monitoring Project and Gender Links in Johannesburg on Wednesday — which is also World Press Freedom Day — at a launch of the HIV/Aids and Gender Baseline Study and Media Resource Desk.
South Africans are getting heavier as they take after the Western world in diet and lack of exercise. This was one of the conclusions in a report presented by the Medical Research Council (MRC) on Wednesday. According to the report, 17% of children between the ages of one and nine were either overweight or obese.
The European Union on Wednesday suspended talks on forging closer ties with Serbia, punishing Belgrade for failing to cooperate fully with UN prosecutors hunting Ratko Mladic and other war-crimes fugitives. Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said the talks on a stabilisation and association agreement — a precursor to any membership talks — were postponed mainly because Mladic, the former Bosnian-Serb commander wanted for genocide, remained at large.
Sales of new vehicles continued to grow in April despite public holidays and therefore fewer trading days, the National Automobile Manufacturers’ Association of South Africa (Naamsa) said on Wednesday. Aggregate new-vehicle sales were at 45 636 units, Naamsa said in a media statement.