Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota has denied that a South African Air Force (SAAF) aircraft, or one chartered by the SAAF, is in Haiti. Lekota was responding to a letter by the Democratic Alliance’s James Selfe on Thursday, asking him to confirm or deny that the South African National Defence Force currently has aircraft in Haiti.
United States Secretary of State Colin Powell asked South Africa to give former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide asylum, a senior South African politician said on Friday. South Africa has since joined Caribbean countries in their call for an investigation into Aristide’s departure from Haiti.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=32258">Looting continues in Haiti</a>
South African churches are following in the footsteps of their American counterparts by booking out whole cinemas to watch Mel Gibson’s new movie, <i>The Passion of the Christ</i>. The movie has stormed the box office of American cinema, placing itself in the top three of all-time opening day releases, writes Yolandi Groenewald.
Festivals have been described as the lifeblood of the arts in this country. They generally have budgets to commission new work. They offer artists real opportunities to generate income. Festivals also provide a barometer of where our artists are at, creatively and thematically. Except for the Mother City of all festivals, which provides more of a barometer of where artists are not, writes Mike van Graan.
Do images of human suffering make a difference? Are we really shaken into compassion, outrage and protest by atrocity photographs; or are we just voyeurs enjoying a gruesome, quasi-pornographic thrill at "snuff" pictures? Susan Sontag, who is soon to visit South Africa, wonders in her new book whether images of suffering have a morally uplifting effect. Anthony Egan reviews.
For a third consecutive year, hundreds of thousands of people in Lesotho are going to need international help to survive due to the combined effects of drought and Aids, a United Nations envoy said on Thursday.
Furious investors in Walt Disney said on Thursday the company had not gone far enough by stripping its long-standing boss Michael Eisner of his chairmanship after the company’s raucous annual meeting in Philadelphia.
The UN nuclear watchdog meets next week with the United States, which has vowed to keep up pressure on Iran over an alleged hidden atomic weapons programme but backed off on taking the matter to the Security Council.
”I trust that God almighty will free my wife from the yoke of slavery,” says Cheikhna Ould Beilil, a middle-aged Mauritanian man, fighting back the tears. Ould Beilil’s story constitutes rare testimony to the continued practice of slavery in the northwest African Islamic republic, despite claims by President Maaouya Ould Taya’s government that it has all but been wiped out.
<img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/41909/10-X-Logo.gif" align=left>The next government needs to put more money into further education, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday. Visiting Tshwane North College’s Mamelodi campus outside Pretoria, Mbeki braved the driving rain to meet the staff and students as part of the African National Congress’s election campaign.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3_fl2.asp?o=40922">Special Report: Elections 2004</a>