Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo on Friday agreed to ground helicopter gunships and expel mercenaries imported to fight rebels battling his government, telling French radio that he was ready for ”total ceasefire”.
South African wheat imports are set to slow or even come to a halt from early April 2003 until at least early August 2003 following the acquisition by the country’s millers of between 500 000 to 600 000 tons of almost all European wheat for shipment from October 2002 to March 2003.
The JSE Securities Exchange ended the week in the black, regaining ground in the afternoon session. Better volumes were traded than on Thursday and the bourse was helped on by the higher gold price on the day.
KwaZulu-Natal Premier Lionel Mtshali has called a special sitting of the KwaZulu-Natal legislature next week to vote on the dissolution of the legislature, in preparation for a provincial election.
Low salaries paid to public officials might be the cause of corruption and the high turnover of staff in the public sector, says a report to the presidency by the Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public Office-Bearers.
The multimillion-rand Arrive Alive campaign has failed to reduce the carnage on South Africa’s roads and analysts say citizens will have to play a far larger role in cutting fatalities. Road fatalities rose 25% in December compared with December 2001.
Few of the schoolchildren whom the government’s policy on school fees is intended to benefit qualify for exemption in practice. And school funding policies that are supposed to redress apartheid-era inequities serve to privilege historically advantaged schools.
False optimism, a dying population and the prospect of war are a few of the issues the world is facing at the start of the New Year just celebrated throughout the world.
Duncan Campbell explains why a collection of films about September 11 has yet to find a distributor in the United States.
The handover of the navy’s first corvette warship from the German Frigate Consortuim will be delayed by up to five months — at a cost of millions of rands — allegedly owing to the supply of faulty communications cable from a South African company.