Planning for Cape Town’s proposed Green Point stadium, earmarked as venue for a 2010 Soccer World Cup semifinal, appears to be back on track following a meeting between city mayor Helen Zille and Fifa local organising committee (LOC) members on Thursday. ”I think the mayor is comfortable right now that the city will not be bankrupt,” LOC chairperson Irvin Khoza said afterwards.
Reasons given by Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi for Matatiele’s incorporation into the Eastern Cape from KwaZulu-Natal were wrong, the Constitutional Court heard on Thursday. ”The minister’s facts are wrong geographically, ethnically, culturally … And his wrong facts are compounded by the fact that nobody has spoken to these people,” said lawyer Alastair Dickson.
Maties has spoken. The university community has voted to ”take back” the university from those who want to allow English to creep too deep into the heart of Afrikanerdom. And some would see the university’s choice of four new council members as a first, small victory for ”neo-Afrikaners” .
The African National Congress e-mail spy saga has widened the ugly developing rift between President Thabo Mbeki and the party’s secretary general, Kgalema Motlanthe. The differences over the authenticity of the e-mails are seen as a microcosm of a new struggle between the two.
More than 7 000 state schools, housing 3,6-million pupils, have so far been identified as qualifying for fee exemptions in terms of the government’s new means-tested fee subsidy scheme. It emerged recently that all the provinces except Gauteng and Mpumalanga have completed the audits of school catchment areas required as a first step towards instituting the scheme.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) is gearing up for a strike in July over the multibillion-rand Gautrain Rapid Rail Link, which the federation complains will service only Gauteng’s elite. Cosatu’s Gauteng provincial secretary, Siphiwe Mgcina, said the federation had lodged a notice of a planned socio-economic strike under Section 77 of the Labour Relations Act.
Australia on Friday warned of a possible terrorist attack against Western interests in Indonesia this weekend, in an updated travel advisory issued by the Foreign Affairs Department in Canberra. The advisory urged Australians against travelling to Indonesia, including the resort island of Bali, ”due to the very high threat of terrorist attack”.
Six South Africans are reported to have been among those who died when a leisure boat sank off the coast of Bahrain, a Department of Foreign Affairs official said on Friday. Initial reports indicated that 13 South African were among the 150 passengers on board, said spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa.
Scientists at an IBM research centre in Silicon Valley have created a magnetism-manipulating tool suited to building molecular computers, the company revealed on Thursday. The development was touted as a step toward making computers based on the spin of electrons and atoms.
A Malaysian executive was killed when his head was struck by a helicopter’s whirling rotor blades in the northern Penang state. Joseph Chan Sum Foo (45), general manager of a construction company, was struck on Thursday after he helped five school children onto the helicopter, which was used in an event to promote his company’s latest property development site.