Absa, South Africa’s largest retail bank in terms of customers at 6,96-million, has announced bank-fee increases of between 4% and 7% for 2005, which will become effective from April 1. "These fees were determined in response to the additional needs of our customers," Absa said.
Uganda, considered a beacon in Africa for its Aids-beating policies, is adopting sexual abstinence-only programmes.
Russia has criticised the UN Security Council approved sanctions against Sudan as being counterproductive. Russia — which abstained along with China and Algeria in Tuesday’s 12-0 Security Council vote in favour of the US-sponsored sanctions — also expressed doubts whether the measures could be effectively monitored.
Prosecutors in the Michael Jackson trial on Tuesday inflicted new setbacks on a defence team already reeling from a decision to allow testimony about the star’s alleged history of child abuse. The prosecution boost came after Judge Rodney Melville ruled that jurors at the child sex trial could hear about five more boys the embattled ”King of Pop” is alleged to have molested in the past.
A United States federal appeals court agreed early on Wednesday to consider a petition by Terri Schiavo’s parents for a new hearing on whether to reconnect their severely brain-damaged daughter’s feeding tube. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled without comment on Schiavo’s 12th day without nourishment.
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Limpopo police have heightened security near the Beit Bridge border post ahead of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) demonstration scheduled for Wednesday. Cosatu expects thousands of marchers to participate in the march in solidarity with Zimbabwean trade unions.
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President Robert Mugabe’s government has increased the minimum wage for domestic servants tenfold. A labour union official said the sudden increase will lead to mass unemployment, and the opposition called it an attempt to drive a wedge between urban employers, thought to support the opposition, and their employees.
South African economists have reacted to South Africa’s consumer price index excluding mortgage rate changes (CPIX) for February. CPIX was up 3,1% year-on-year for metro and other areas in February. "The figure is pretty much as expected, but the main concern is on the outlook for the next few months," said one economist.
United States celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochran, who shot to worldwide fame as head of the legal team that got OJ Simpson acquitted of murder, died on Tuesday at the age of 67, his family said. His wife, Dale, and his family appealed for him to be remembered as more than just the lawyer who got Simpson off murder charges.
A bookworm who hoarded 83 library books at his Hong Kong home and told librarians he had lost them has been given a suspended jail sentence, a news report said on Wednesday. The unemployed man was convicted of abusing library regulations in the first case of its kind in Hong Kong.