Last year I attended a conference in the United States about security and intelligence in the so-called war on terror and was astonished to hear one of the more belligerent participants, who as far as I could tell had nothing but contempt for religion, strongly argue that as a purely practical expedient, politicians and the media must stop referring to ”Muslim terrorism”.
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A partial building collapse spewed tonnes of rubble and timber on to a busy New York City sidewalk on Thursday, injuring at least four people and triggering an urgent search-and-rescue mission. The building was under demolition and surrounded by scaffolding when the collapse occurred.
Johannesburg is expected to be the 12th-largest city in the world by 2015, Minister of Housing Lindiwe Sisulu said on Thursday. ”Paradoxically, Gauteng is known to be the smallest province geographically,” Sisulu said in a speech prepared for delivery at a Gauteng housing summit.
The mass evictions from a building in Bree Street in central Johannesburg are ”utterly barbaric” and unconstitutional, a legal expert said at the site on Thursday afternoon. Stuart Woolfson, of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, said to evict people without giving them interim shelter is cruel and an abuse of human rights.
A male Zimbabwean athlete who won several awards in women’s competitions in Southern Africa was on Thursday sentenced to four years in jail for offensive behaviour, the prosecutor said. Samukeliso Sithole (18) was arrested in February after a female friend lodged a complaint to police.
The Competition Commission on Thursday recommended the approval, under certain conditions, of a merger between Media24 and the owners of the Natal Witness newspaper. The condition is that the shares held by the Natal Witness in Lincroft Books be transferred to Lexshell 496 Investments.
Mlindazwe Nkula, a founding member of the Pan Africanist Congress, has died at the age of 76, the PAC announced on Thursday. Nkula, who died on July 8, was also a founder member of the PAC’s armed wing, Poqo, in 1959. After the 1994 elections, he worked at the pension division of the Department of Finance in Pretoria.
The Vredefort Dome, spanning the Free State and the North West provinces, has been declared a World Heritage Site, the Department of Arts and Culture said on Thursday, making it the country’s seventh such site. This decision was made earlier in the day at the 29th World Heritage Committee meeting being held in Durban.
The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> reports in its latest edition, available on Friday, that the African National Congress has misled the nation on the Oilgate scandal. Documents in the possession of the <i>M&G</i> make it clear that Imvume Management — the company that channelled R11-million in state oil money to the ANC before the 2004 election — was effectively a front for the ruling party.