The African National Congress has finally acted against conflict of interest and potential corruption in its ranks by adopting a policy that bars public officials from working for the private sector in an area where they had been active in government. At the national general council in Pretoria, the party adopted a ”cooling-off period” resolution.
It was a new kind of story. Not in the sense of what happened, which was thoroughly and depressingly as anticipated, but in the way it was reported and disseminated. The mobile phone photographers, the text messagers and the bloggers – a new advance guard of amateur reporters had the London bomb story in the can before the news crews got anywhere near the scene.
Nasa controllers on Sunday night set the countdown clock ticking to the first shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster. Crew safety has become the priority of the national space agency in the two and a half years since seven astronauts were lost when Columbia blew apart during re-entry over Texas.
Hurricane Dennis sent Gulf coast residents fleeing on Sunday, but spared the region the worst of the predicted devastation after it weakened shortly before landfall. The hurricane, which left 32 people in Haiti and Cuba dead, arrived in Alabama and northwestern Florida packing 192kph winds, pounding the beachfronts in an area that was hit by Hurricane Ivan just 10 months ago.
So there’s this Indian chap who goes to dog training with us on Sundays when everyone else is in church. His wife, who is not Indian, sends him there. She has put him on the 20-week dog training course to punish him for his regular Saturday night binges, which leaves him with a Sunday morning hangover and what one might politely call dog breath.
BMW has produced, in the R1200 RT, a machine that is light years ahead of the R1150 RT, the model it replaces. With its flat twin now displacing 1 170cc and generating 81 kW (110 bhp) and 115 Nm of torque it’s a truly formidable high-speed touring machine. Apart from the extra power and torque delivered by the bigger engine.
"If I happen to be in an accident and I become a vegetable, I would like my partner to have a right to my belongings," says Darren Hayward, a gay South African who has been in a committed relationship for the past six years. Hayward, like other gay and lesbian South Africans, is looking forward to good news from the Constitutional Court later this year regarding same-sex marriages.
Fords new Territory has arrived, and — on paper at least — it seems like a good ‘un, as long as you can afford the fuel. Available only with a four-litre 182 kW six-cylinder in-line engine pinched from the Falcon, the Territory comes in two- wheel and four-wheel-drive derivatives.
Recently, ministerial housing delegates from South Africa, Brazil and India put their heads together in Cape Town to come up with a united proposal for slum eradication ahead of the United Nations meeting on Millennium Development Goals in September. The political fight at that meeting is expected to be over the proposed reduction by 10% of the estimated 100-million slum-dwellers worldwide.
One of my closest friends and a long-time comrade, Ronald Louw, has died. Two major Aids related factors caused his death: HIV denial and undiagnosed tuberculosis (TB). Denial meant that he did not test for HIV until almost too late. And unreliable TB diagnostics developed more than 100 years ago meant that as his immune system was destroyed by HIV.