The Zimbabwean government has deployed 3Â 000 paramilitary police as it begins an operation to demolish illegal settlements around Harare, state television reported on Thursday. The television news showed a parade of hundreds of officers in full riot gear preparing to be deployed to demolish 25 illegal settlements in and around the capital.
Communist heavy-hitter Phillip Dexter, the new acting CEO of the Mpumalanga Economic Empowerment Corporation, will have his work cut out turning back the tide of sleaze at the scandal-plagued agency. The report of a PricewaterhouseCoopers forensic inquiry paints a gloomy picture of widespread misconduct, poor management control and breach of statutory obligations.
Church Square in Pretoria has seen some deadly serious encounters: one Friday lunch-hour in 1990 about 5 000 members of the newly-unbanned African National Congress confronted a police cordon. But last Sunday was not one of those occasions, despite the fact that roughly the same number of angry people gathered on the square to protest against the decision to rename Pretoria Tshwane.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) will go on a nationwide strike on June 27 to protest against the ”catastrophic loss of jobs and intolerably high levels of unemployment in the country”, Cosatu secretary general Zwelinzima Vavi said on Thursday. More than 10 000 jobs have been lost since January, and 30 000 more are under threat.
An Indonesian court on Friday convicted an Australian beauty school student of smuggling marijuana into the tourist island of Bali and sentenced her to 20 years in prison. Schapelle Corby (27) who insists she is innocent and that the drugs were planted in her luggage, fought back tears as the verdict was announced.
Japan is likely to provoke the biggest diplomatic clash over whale hunting for years on Friday when it proposes doubling the number it is allowed to kill for ”scientific research”. Japanese officials refused to discuss details ahead of the opening on Friday of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Ulsan, South Korea.
Egypt’s constitutional referendum won an 83% yes vote, officials said on Thursday. The campaign was hit by sporadic violence after boycott calls from opposition parties and pro-democracy activists. The interior ministry said 16,4-million or 54% of Egypt’s 32-million registered voters took part, a figure higher than in parliamentary elections.
A global conference to review the non-proliferation treaty is due to end on Friday, almost certainly in deadlock, jeopardising what is seen as the best chance of containing the spread of nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has said it will stick to its moratorium on nuclear tests but would not accede to a global treaty outlawing them.
The African National Congress’s Western Cape conference has been postponed for the sixth time in five months, turning a spotlight on the party’s provincial secretary, Mcebisi Skwatsha. Skwatsha, criticised for organisational failures amid acrimonious jockeying for party leadership posts, rejected the charge that he lacks administrative ability.
An important new land study warns the government against setting up poor black South Africans for failure in the farming sector. The report, released by the Johannesburg-based Centre for Development and Enterprise, says the hard truth is that agriculture offers few opportunities for addressing unemployment, poverty or inequality on a significant scale, and provides an economic future for fewer and fewer people.