Hyundai’s first full-size luxury car to be sold in South Africa, the Azera, is hard to fault. The Korean company’s new flagship is powerful, spacious, comfortable and safe. It’s also extremely quiet and delivers a very plush ride, which renders dreams of uniformed chauffeurs and bottles of champagne being consumed in the back seats quite plausible.
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.
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.
South African-based railway operator Comazar was declared winner on Thursday of an international tender to administer the 1 000km Ethio-Djibouti railway for 25 years. The line runs from the Ethiopian capital to the small neighbouring country of Djibouti, at the southern entrance to the Red Sea.
Former United States Open champion Svetlana Kuznetsova routed the top-seeded Frenchwoman Amelie Mauresmo 6-1, 6-4 to reach the final of the WTA and ATP Nasdaq-100 Open on Thursday. Mauresmo had won their first four encounters before Kuznetsova posted a 7-6 (13-11), 6-4 win in the Dubai quarterfinals earlier this year.
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”.