Parliament has scheduled a three-hour debate on the joint investigation team’s findings on the controversial arms procurement package, in which the opposition will resurrect complaints that the government is hiding the true cost of the deal.
The Eastern Cape provincial executive committee (PEC) of the African National Congress will meet in Umtata on Friday to disband the leadership of the Transkei region, which has split into factions. The groups reportedly came to blows at a recent meeting in Port St Johns.
Hundreds of patients were turned away from at least one Gauteng Department of Health clinic in Soweto this week after nurses refused to work any more overtime until they were paid. The nurses at Zola clinic are expected to work 33 hours of overtime a week in addition to their 40 regular hours.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions’s (Cosatu) planned anti-privatisation strike has been timed to precede the African National Congress’s national conference as a pressure tactic, it was learned this week. The strike will take place a month before the ANC conference in Stellenbosch.
A solution for dealing with old tyres, already under way in the United States, is now being tried out in Britain — building houses with them. Called ”earthships”, the homes provide their own solar power, water supply and sewage systems, and could solve the shortage of low-cost housing.
Health watchdogs in the United Kingdom are preparing to ban kava-kava, the popular herbal remedy for anxiety that has been linked to liver damage and death. A voluntary agreement with manufacturers and retailers to keep it off the shelves, adopted last December, has not been universally followed.
Northern Ireland faces a ”nightmare scenario” with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein becoming the dominant parties and the peace process in such trouble that it would take a generation to resolve, First Minister David Trimble said this week.
It seems that prisons commissioner Linda Mti was not happy with Grootvlei prison chief Tatalo Setlai using the prison as the set for a ”big brother” video on warder corruption. SABC3 screened the video, showing warders trading in drugs, alcohol and guns, and selling juvenile inmates for sex.
A 16-year-long ordeal for the population of northern Uganda appears to be nearly over. One of the African continent’s most brutal rebel movements, the Lord’s Resistance Army was placed on a list of terrorist organisations by the UN, giving impetus to the Ugandan army’s hunt for the rebels.
The court of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern African States (Comesa) has changed its rules to bar the lead counsel for the Comesa bank from appearing in the court.