The Gauteng Taxi Council on Thursday embarked on a march around Johannesburg demanding the Gauteng government recognise its members and deal with problems facing the industry. In seven days the organisation plans a countrywide march if the provincial government does not meet certain demands.
The United Nations is trying to transform one of the most politically unstable countries in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), into a multiparty democracy with elections scheduled for 2005. But to do so, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wants to more than double the number of UN peacekeepers in the DRC.
Rebellious old habits die hard in the northwestern Swiss valley of Val-de-Travers, where the alcoholic drink absinthe, nicknamed the ”green fairy”, is about to become legal again. The lush, forested valley of 12 000 people in the Jura hills near the French border claims to have been the birthplace of absinthe, which was said to make one blind or mad when prohibition took hold in 1908.
The shallow and warm waters off a remote port on the Sainte-Mairie island are alive with the sound of music — the eerie wailing of hundreds of humpback whales, who escape the rigours of the Antarctic winter and come here every year to breed and croon.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has dismissed claims that his government supported the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the main opposition party in Zimbabwe. Straw said a total of 45-million pounds (about R539-million) was available to fund land reform in Zimbabwe should a solution be found to the political and economic crisis in that country.
The minister of health has played down the target of rolling out anti-retroviral treatment for HIV victims by the end of the year — saying most South Africans prefer to consult traditional healers first before going to a Western health facility. The government had set itself a target of treating 53 000 Aids patients this year.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), which has been meeting with African National Congress representatives in Cape Town, says it virulently opposes relaxation of exchange controls — and "speed bumps" should be put in place to protect the economy.
There was a time when the most Doreen Morris could hope for was filling white people’s bellies and cleaning up their mess. To be black in apartheid South Africa was to be limited in opportunity, if not hope, especially when home was a tin shack in a township gangland. But the emerging black middle class now employ their own domestic help.
China will get its first bullfights in the next few months, complete with matadors from Spain, but the bulls will have to come from somewhere else, the government says. Organisers of the bullfights, planned for China’s National Day holidays in early October, had planned to airlift six bulls from Spain for the events.
Like everything built by Adolf Hitler the scale is huge. His Baltic Sea resort Prora for Third Reich workers sprawls 4,5km along pristine beaches on the island of Ruegen — and half of it has just been put up for sale by the German government. Historians say Hitler personally ordered construction of the complex which is a forerunner of mega-resorts opened around the world in the post-World War II era.