The restitution of land to those previously dispossessed of it will not result in a stoppage of agricultural production in South Africa, the Land Claims Commission said on Wednesday.
Prices of some commodities, particularly furniture and electrical goods, have started dropping drastically in Zimbabwe, but a crisis in the banking sector continues to hound depositors. Economists say businesses are trying to raise cash to invest on the money market, where interest rates have shot to more than 700%.
Shares in South African retailer Woolworths lost ground in morning trade on Thursday after the group released a trading update for the six months to July showing a disappointing performance from its Australian subsidiary and slightly softer-than-expected sales for the Christmas period.
”My son’s death is not any more special than anyone else’s,” says Lynne Vince-Jillings. She is just one of the thousands of South Africans to have lost a child at the hands of criminals. What has made Ivanne’s death different is that it forced his mother to channel her pain and anger into a campaign that encourages the public to take a pro-active stance against crime.
The Democratic Alliance’s ”report card” was getting worse by the year and it showed signs of desperation from the opposition, the City of Johannesburg said on Wednesday. DA leader in Johannesburg Mike Moriarty said most services in the city had deteriorated and the billing system was chaotic.
Zambia’s government has issued a warrant for the arrest of a British writer who was ordered to quit the country for ”insulting” President Levy Mwanawasa in his weekly newspaper column. ”All security agents in the country have been ordered to look for Roy Clarke and immediately detain him pending his deportation,” a senior police officer said.
Why a British expat is being deported
A Kinshasa court has sentenced three journalists and six employees of state television in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to a year in jail for defamation and calumny. Each was also ordered to pay damages of 500 to Kikaya, said rights group Journalists in Danger.
A German human rights group on Wednesday demanded an official apology from Berlin for the ”genocide” of native people when Namibia was a German colony. The Society of Threatened Peoples (GfbV) said Berlin bore direct responsibility for 75 000 people who died in Namibia a century ago during the suppression of rebellions against German rule.
The International Monetary Fund last night warned that the gaping US budget deficit, ballooning trade imbalance and falling dollar were posing a serious threat to the health of the global economy.
Climate change over the next 50 years is expected to drive a quarter of land animals and plants into extinction, according to the first comprehensive study into the effect of higher temperatures on the natural world. The scale of the disaster facing the planet shocked those involved in the research. They estimate that more than one million species will be lost by 2050.