It’s been revealed that only one in 10 learners who register for sector education and training authority (Seta) learnerships finish their courses. National Skills Authority data up to June this year show that only 9 502 of a total of 70 000 of registered learners have completed their learnerships since the system was implemented in March 2001. These figures equate to a completion rate of 14%.

The Reverend Frank Chikane will stick with President Thabo Mbeki as head of his office almost until the end of his term. Cabinet has announced that Chikane’s contract has been extended for another three years. His appointment was one of a number of senior appointments approved by Cabinet at its meeting this week.

After almost a month as number 2070 in a morgue fridge, Simon Mangaliso Radebe will recapture his humanity on Saturday when he is buried at the Roodeport Cemetery in Soweto. Radebe made headlines after Johannesburg paramedics allegedly refused to take him in their ambulance because he was ”too dirty”and flea-ridden. Radebe died in the Johannesburg city centre where the paramedics had left him.

South African National Parks (SANParks) is reconsidering a management plan that will see between 400 and 1 000 elephant culled in the Kruger National Park annually for at least five years. At a high-level indaba held this week to discuss burgeoning elephant populations, SANParks director of conservation services, Hector Magome, said it was time to dust off a plan that was launched in 1999 but shelved amid controversy.

President Thabo Mbeki answered questions in the National Assembly on Thursday for the first time in almost a year, but he refused to allow robust exchanges on HIV/Aids, the economy and Zimbabwe to divert him from his script. Question time was still under way as the M&G went to press, but its opening half was dominated by a renewed attack on what Mbeki described as racist assumptions about rape and sexual behaviour generally.

A tale of prostitutes, old age, youthful beauty and the madness of love brought the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez new critical acclaim on Thursday as his first novel for a decade reached book shops in the Spanish-speaking world. The book, described as a hymn to the renewing qualities of love and the rich possibilities of old age, has been lavished with praise by the critics.

A United States soldier at the centre of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal was on Thursday sentenced to eight years for sexually and physically abusing detainees. Staff Sergeant Ivan ”Chip” Frederick (38) who admitted carrying out a mock electrocution of a detainee, was also given a reduction in rank, forfeiture of pay and a dishonourable discharge.