Firefighters searched early on Monday for more victims as they sifted through the rubble of a shopping centre in Paraguay destroyed by a blaze that killed nearly 300 people. Argentine authorities said they would make their hospitals available to blaze victims, and the Argentine air force readied a plane to speed more aid to Paraguay.
Big Ben, the famous clock tower on Britain’s Houses of Parliament, could be surrounded by an electric fence as part of new security measures to shield it from terrorists and publicity-seeking protesters, a report said on Monday. Big Ben is considered a trophy target for terrorists, the Times newspaper said.
Egypt on Monday began airlifting relief aid to millions of Sudanese people in dire need for food, medicine and other basics due to a 17-month conflict in the western Darfur region. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the supplies were donated by the Egyptian Red Crescent with the help of the Defence Ministry.
The government needs to review its immigration policy, including possibly rewriting the Immigration Act, says Minister of Home Affairs Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. ”There will be a need in the long term for government to look at a more holistic review of our immigration policy,” she said on Monday.
Eighty-five people from Gamorona village near Vryburg in the North West appeared in court on Monday after being arrested over the weekend for public violence and assault, police said. The villagers called a meeting with a chief on Saturday, accusing a family of stocktheft. They attacked the family, burning their houses to the ground.
Marooned in a lake, Bhajan Das is determined to protect his most prized possession: the tin roof of his mud and bamboo shack. The 22-year-old returned home with his mother on Sunday to find his cow floating dead in tea-brown water and with the walls of his homestead blown away by two weeks of torrential monsoon rain.
Dissatisfaction with the way in which business is handling black economic empowerment (BEE) is growing, the South African Communist Party said on Monday. In a statement following Friday’s SACP political bureau meeting, the party said this was because of the ”narrow BEE approaches with which big capital in South Africa is trying to head off the real challenge of significant transformation”.
The Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) signed a deal on Monday for a loan of R56-million for the construction of a hotel in Bel Ombre on the southern coast of Mauritius. The hotel project forms part of a broader initiative for the development of the Bel Ombre sub-region.
South African life assurer and financial services group Liberty announced on Monday that it intends to cancel the company’s secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange. It said the action is being taken due to the small number of shareholders and trades in the company’s shares in the United Kingdom.
A key provision in the current Immigration Act, which has led to much confusion over the recording of travel by South African citizens abroad, is to be dumped. Prior to the coming into force of the Act, the movement control system recorded the entry and exit of everyone who left or entered the country.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=119707">Minister calls for immigration review</a>