The Pan-Africanist Congress has scuppered an opposition pact to control Cape Town involving seven smaller opposition parties and the Democratic Alliance — out of frustration over haggling for positions. On Thursday the DA was ready to table the opposition party deal at its top executive structure and prepare to trade its mayoral candidate Helen Zille for control of the city it lost in the October 2002 defection period.
Despite about 800 service delivery protests held across the country and an election boycott in Khutsong, the African National Congress has emerged from the municipal elections having consolidated its already firm hold on local government, with no stay-aways to speak of (other than Khutsong).
Environmentalists have accused Virgin Atlantic of double standards over an initiative to plant trees to compensate for the carbon dioxide emissions from limousines used to drive its customers to airports. Richard Branson’s airline this week said it was ”actively exploring” options such as Carbon Neutral — a controversial programme of planting trees to offset carbon emissions.
More than 20-million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk of famine, in conditions the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) described recently as the worst in his experience. James Morris, executive director of the WFP, has warned the international community that millions of people in Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Tanzania are now at risk because of drought.
Jacob Zuma is on trial for one of the most heinous crimes imaginable in our criminal code. Observing the histrionics in the environs of the Johannesburg High Court, one wouldn’t have thought so. Zuma the accused sweeps into court in expensive state-issue motor vehicles accompanied by besuited armed security — provided by the state.
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An unemployed teacher took 18 students, a teacher and another man hostage at gunpoint at a high school in western France on Thursday, officials said. At the time of going to press the drama was unfolding in a state high school in the town of Sable-sur-Sarthe, southwest of Le Mans.
Although South Africa was the biggest importer of poultry in Africa, it was also the country best prepared against avian flu, a Southern African Development Community (SADC) workshop on the epidemic heard in Pretoria on Thursday. ”South Africa is in a very good place. You are used to fighting bird flu.”
Villagers on the Zanzibar archipelago appealed for food aid on Thursday, after being hit by a drought that has hurt farmers across East Africa. The drought has also led to hunger in mainland Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti. ”We are facing a serious shortage of food in our village.”