Elder statesman Nelson Mandela is to meet with the leaders of Burundi on Wednesday who are struggling to agree on a power-sharing agreement to pave the way for elections, a South African official said. Mandela is to go to the Pretoria home of Deputy President Jacob Zuma where Burundi’s President Domitien Ndayizeye and three other political party leaders were to hold a final round of talks.
The conclusion of a protracted legal dispute between South African defence industry firms and the United States will improve defence trade between the two countries, US ambassador Cameron Hume said on Wednesday. ”South African companies now have an open field in the American defence industry,” he told reporters in Pretoria.
The Chinese military surgeon who exposed the government’s cover-up of the Sars crisis was released on Tuesday after seven weeks of ”political re-education”, his family said. Jiang Yanyong (72) a semi-retired general in the People’s Liberation Army, had been detained at a secret location where he was forced to undergo daily study sessions aimed to make him renounce a critical letter he had written about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
A passenger died on a London-bound South African Airways (SAA) flight on Tuesday night, forcing the aircraft to return to Johannesburg, the company said on Wednesday. SAA said flight SA238 left Johannesburg International airport at 8.30pm on Tuesday but returned two hours later due to the woman’s death.
The number of internet users in China has risen 28% over the past year to 87-million, and use of broadband and online commerce is soaring, the government said on Wednesday. The number of broadband subscribers has jumped 78,7% in the past six months to 31,1-million, the China Internet Network Information Centre said on its website.
The South African government has welcomed the announcement by the United States State Department that the debarment of Armscor, Fuchs and Denel has been rescinded. The debarment was originally instituted in 1994 as a result of activities undertaken in the US by these companies during the pre-1994 arms embargo era.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=119078">SA can now sell arms to the US</a>
Seventy men led by a former SAS officer go on trial in Zimbabwe on Wednesday charged with offences related to an alleged coup plot in Equatorial Guinea. The suspected mercenaries could be jailed for life in Zimbabwe, but are said to be more concerned at the possibility of extradition to Equatorial Guinea and execution.
Every so often, a story seizes the public’s interest. It’s usually a heart-string-tugging, human-interest one. The mass of media track it with persistence, passion and purpose. People take it up on the talk shows and at dinner tables. The kidnapping (and, now, grimly, the murder) of Johannesburg student Leigh Matthews became this kind of story.
Massive illicit digging at the uranium mine that fuelled the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs threatens to put the mine’s nuclear ore into terrorist hands, United Nations investigators warned on Tuesday. The 15 000 miners working at the east Democratic Republic of Congo’s Shinkolobwe mine risk contracting cancer and developing other health problems because of high radiation levels.
Microsoft said on Tuesday it will use its massive cash reserve for a -billion share buyback over four years and to pay out a special dividend amounting to -billion dollars. The world’s biggest software firm, sitting on a pile of some -billion in cash, said the moves were part of an effort to deliver an estimated -billion to its shareholders.