Gold exploration company Wits Gold was likely to list on the JSE in the middle of April as part of the company’s strategy and to increase the company’s profile, chief executive officer Marc Watchorn said on Wednesday. In 2004, the company acquired gold resources from AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields and Harmony Gold.
China’s health ministry banned the sale of human organs on Tuesday in a move that could put pressure on the growing transplant tourism industry. According to tour operators, Britons and other foreigners have been paying tens of thousands of dollars for life-saving operations in China, where livers, kidneys, hearts and lungs are harvested from executed prisoners.
Vitamin salesman Matthias Rath has dropped his defamation claims against the South African Press Association (Sapa) and other media organisations. However, he was still suing the Democratic Alliance, its leader Tony Leon, its health spokesperson Diane Kohler-Barnard, and African National Congress MP Kader Asmal, said his lawyer.
After giving birth to healthy twins, Mrs A, a young Indian woman, handed them to a United States-based couple knowing she was unlikely to see them again. ”Her parents never knew what she was doing,” her mother-in-law confides. ”She told them she had a baby boy but he passed away.”
South Africa’s consumer price index excluding mortgage rate changes (CPIX) for metro and other areas, which is used by the South African Reserve Bank for its inflation target, rose by 4,5% year-on-year (y/y) in February after increasing by 4,3% y/y in January, Statistics South Africa said on Wednesday.
Most adolescents in the United States are sleep deprived, jeopardising their mental, emotional and physical growth and damaging their performance in the classrom, said a study published on Tuesday. The problem could even be fatal, as adolescents learn to drive often without enough sleep, the study said.
China, officially celebrating the ‘Year of Italy’, has reacted angrily to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s comments that Chinese people used to ”boil babies”. ”We are not satisfied with such remarks, which are groundless and lack any facts,” the foreign ministry said in a brief statement faxed to Agence France-Presse on Wednesday.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets of France on Tuesday, disrupting schools and transport in a nationwide strike to pressure the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, to withdraw his controversial new employment law. Paris police said they made 105 arrests. Officers were armed with guns of indelible ink to fire at troublemakers.
United Nations chief Kofi Annan on Tuesday appealed to West African countries to arrest and deny refuge to Liberia’s former leader and war crimes suspect Charles Taylor, who has disappeared from Nigeria. Taylor is accused by a UN-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone of masterminding a policy of murder, torture, pillage and rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
SA Rugby declined the Southern Spears’ request to meet on Tuesday before its board decides whether the franchise will play in next year’s Super 14. SA Rugby managing director Johan Prinsloo informed the Spears that the board of directors was too busy during its two-day meeting starting late on Tuesday.