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/ 30 November 2004
Gauteng education MEC Angie Motshekga did not benefit financially or act dishonestly in recommending a particular trust for a contract, a report released on Tuesday said. Motshekga’s conduct in her position as MEC was, however, found to be unacceptable. The Gauteng Legislature’s Integrity Commission investigated media allegations that Motshekga and her family had benefited financially from the Sediba Trust.
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/ 30 November 2004
The Congress of South African Trade Unions called on the African National Congress on Tuesday to arrange an urgent meeting to discuss tensions between the two organisations. ”We are calling on the ANC to exercise its leadership role,” Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi told reporters in Johannesburg. This comes after comments on Sunday by ANC spokesman Smuts Ngonyama in which he called Vavi ”reckless”.
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/ 30 November 2004
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has found prisoner abuse that amounts to ”a form of torture” at a United States military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, The New York Times said on Tuesday, citing a confidential report. The Geneva-based agency has refused to confirm or deny the article.
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/ 30 November 2004
A top army official in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) called on Tuesday for ”more dynamic” measures to disarm rebels and militias in the region, saying he was unimpressed by the current campaign. The general was speaking on the same day that Rwandan President Paul Kagame hinted that Rwandan troops were back in eastern DRC to hunt down and tackle Hutu extremists.
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/ 30 November 2004
Leaning against a blackboard in front of her class, Abrehet Amha, a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl, explains how she lost half a leg when she stepped on a landmine two years ago.Addis Tesfa, a village in whose school the lesson is being held, lies two kilometres from the border with Eritrea. Landmines were extensively used during the 1998-2000 war between the neighbours and still litter northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
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/ 30 November 2004
South African President Thabo Mbeki will travel to strife-torn Ivory Coast within the next two days on an African Union (AU) mandate to try to restore calm in the west African country, the foreign ministry said on Tuesday. .
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/ 30 November 2004
Grieving relatives in the Niger Delta jungle river port of Ojobo have accused Nigerian soldiers of shooting dead seven unarmed demonstrators during a community protest on an oil rig operated for the Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell.
But army spokesman Colonel Yusuf Mohammed said: ”They are all telling lies. The elders were having a meeting with the oil company when the youths disrupted them. The soldiers came to disperse them and only some few of them were injured.”
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/ 30 November 2004
If Texas executes Frances Newton as scheduled on Tuesday, she would become the first woman put to death in two years, despite serious doubts about a botched defense and a poor investigation. Only 10 women have been suffered the death penalty since it was reinstated in the United States in 1976, out of a total of 944 executions. Newton, 39, was charged in April 1987 with the murder of her husband and her two children. Her husband was found on the living room sofa with a bullet in the head, while her son and daughter were found in their beds, each with a bullet to the chest.
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/ 30 November 2004
Hundreds of delegates started arriving on Tuesday in Harare ahead of this week’s ruling party congress which is likely to see the election of Zimbabwe’s first woman vice-president. Around 9 000 delegates of President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) are due to attend the five-day conference, which begins on Wednesday.
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/ 30 November 2004
Iran boasted on Tuesday that it had humiliated the United States at a board meeting of the UN atomic watchdog by agreeing to what it reiterated was only a temporary freeze of its suspect nuclear programme. ”The Islamic republic has not renounced the nuclear fuel cycle, will never renounce it and will use it,” top national security official and nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani told a news conference.