Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel has told the National Assembly that the secondary tax on companies (STC) "will not disappear as long as the African National Congress is in government". The official opposition Democratic Alliance has called for "the usefulness of the secondary tax to be reassessed".
World number six gold-miner Harmony Gold has issued Section 189 notices of restructuring at four more shafts, a Solidarity spokesperson said on Tuesday. "Harmony is restructuring as we have excess labour at the current rand environment," Harmony marketing director Ferdi Dippenaar said.
The chiefs of Moscow’s Olympics bid committee expressed confidence on Tuesday that existing sport venues were already capable of hosting world-class events, as representatives from the International Olympic Committee continued to evaluate the Russian capital’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
South African peacekeeping soldiers in Burundi are becoming increasingly unpopular with the local population, the News24 website reported on Wednesday. It quoted the latest intelligence report by The Economist newspaper as saying: ”They got themselves the unfortunate reputation for excessive drinking and the abuse of prostitutes.”
The Gautrain Rapid Rail Link will be ready for the 2010 Soccer World Cup, the project leader said on Tuesday. ”It’s a brave man who says it straight like that but the answer is yes, we will commission the whole system in time for the World Cup,” said Jack van der Merwe, chief executive of the Gautrain project.
Hogging the headlines about the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in recent times has been the resignation of the broadcaster’s CEO, Peter Matlare, and speculation about his successor. Whoever takes his job will face the fundamental tension of running a public broadcaster service through commercial means. And by the rules.
Never since independence has Zimbabwe desperately needed President Robert Mugabe as much as it does now. The country, the ruling party and the opposition are all in chaos and only he can get the nation out of this hole. Zimbabwe faces an acute leadership crisis that only Mugabe has the capacity to resolve, if he so decides. He Mugabe still has the nation’s future in his hands.
Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, on Tuesday announced that he would begin withdrawing his country’s troops from Iraq in September under pressure from public opinion. ”I’ve spoken to [Tony] Blair about this,” he told a TV interviewer. ”We’ve got to construct a precise exit strategy. Public opinion expects it, and we shall be talking about it soon.”
More than 180 000 people have died from hunger and disease during the last 18 months of the Darfur conflict, the United Nations said on Tuesday, as negotiations continued at its New York headquarters to break the deadlock on a new security council resolution to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government.
The United States plans to wreck a British initiative to commit the G8 states to combatting illegal logging in the world’s threatened rainforests, a leaked memorandum revealed on Tuesday night. The British initiative was prompted by Indonesia, which said corruption there was so rampant that the authorities did not have the power to tackle the supply of timber by criminal gangs