Train services were running relatively smoothly on Wednesday, a Metrorail spokesperson said as a countrywide strike entered its third day. Thandi Mlangeni said 97% of trains were running in the Witwatersrand area, 60% in Tshwane, 88% in Durban and 21% in Cape Town.
Former president Nelson Mandela is leading a last-ditch attempt to save Deputy President Jacob Zuma, the Business Day website reported on Wednesday. It said this came after President Thabo Mbeki said he would announce his decision on Zuma’s fate after his return from a two-day state visit to Chile.
A man’s leg and part of his torso fell from a South African Airways (SAA) jetliner on to a suburban New York home on Tuesday as the aircraft prepared to land at John F Kennedy airport, authorities and the airline said. More remains were found inside the wheel-well of the SAA aircraft when it landed at JFK, arriving from Johannesburg via Dakar, Senegal.
The Oscar-winning actor Anne Bancroft, who immortalised the role of the graduate-seducing Mrs Robinson on the big screen, has died at the age of 73. A spokesperson for her husband, Mel Brooks, announced on Tuesday that she had died of uterine cancer at a hospital in Los Angeles on Monday.
Three million children will die in the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the failure of the global community to meet its promise of slashing the death rates of the under-fives by 2015, the United Nations will reveal on Thursday.
Schabir Shaik’s case links back to the Hefer commission, and goes forward to Deputy President Jacob Zuma. The saga also goes further, to what President Thabo Mbeki should be doing, and this is the story the media should be chasing. All the way. It’s time to get beyond the last-gasp cliché’s like "shaken, rattled and rolled over".
How does a society rehabilitate a 14-year-old rapist? In South Africa, we don’t. We lock children like this up. Put them away, run them through the criminal justice system and turn them into hardened criminals. But is this an effective and humane way to deal with children?
If you asked someone to list 10 words they associate with South Africa, "crime" would almost certainly be among them. With 35 000 young people under the age of 21 currently awaiting trial or sentenced and imprisoned, it would seem that lawlessness is going to be a defining feature of South Africa for a long time to come.
In my two previous columns, I looked at the basics of education. What is basic about education, and what is basic to accomplishing it? The answers, I said, revolve around the tight connection among three familiar terms: learning, change and leadership. Education is most fundamentally about learning.
Clinics in rural areas often have hundreds of pamphlets on health issues, but very few of these well-intended leaflets reach their target audience. About 30% of South African adults are functionally illiterate and this figure is often higher in rural communities where many pamphlets end up as fuel for the household fire.