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In an interview with the SABC, Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin responded to our story last week about the inflated value ascribed to many of the offset projects linked to the arms deal. He said: "The Mail & Guardian article was factually inaccurate in a whole range of ways … The figures about a drop in exports are just wrong. We don’t respond to such grossly inaccurate and speculative nonsense."
Antibiotic-resistant marker genes used in genetically engineered (GE) plants might already be harming South Africans.
The Magistrates’ Commission has been bombarded with shocking accounts of racism, smear campaigns and division among judicial officials during the disciplinary hearing of the chief magistrate of Pretoria. The commission deals with complaints against magistrates.
Concluding a torrid meeting on Wednesday, the Unisa council voted overwhelmingly that the university would not pay the legal costs its chairperson McCaps Motimele incurred in defending charges of sexual harassment and defamation brought by former Unisa Professor Margaret Orr, well-placed sources say. And it voted unanimously that Motimele should resign from the council.
African National Congress MPs and Cabinet ministers deflected criticism of the industrial offsets linked to South Africa’s arms package in Parliament this week, insisting the deal was strictly a defence matter and the offset benefits merely a "bonus".
Tertiary institutions this week received government notice of drastic alterations to their teaching programmes, to kick in from next year.
The future of Zandile Jakavula, the CEO of Spoornet who last week was found guilty of impropriety involving a property deal, hangs in the balance after he challenged the parastatal’s sanctions against him.
Eleven-year-old Lerato Nkosi dreams of becoming a doctor. To realise her ambition, she dodges her mother’s protective gaze to join her boisterous peers on their walk to Vulamasango Primary School in KaNyamazane, Mpumalanga.
In March Melvin Muggels (18) was sentenced to 15 years for helping to saw off the head of a mentally disabled man in Mitchells Plain. He had pleaded guilty and had not planned the deed, which spared him life imprisonment. Muggels was participating in a plea-bargaining pilot project.