MICHAEL MATARI and PHILLIP NKOSI, Thohoyandou | Monday A GROUP of more than 24_000 former Venda homeland officials is demanding that government repay them an estimated R1bn in unpaid pensions – and they allege that at least one local banking institution has withheld R358m that was invested with it in 1992. The group, the Dabalorivhuwa […]

THE SA Police Service’s Commercial Crime Unit has in the past three weeks confiscated counterfeit and stolen computer software worth almost R15m, says computer software giant Microsoft. Police raided a computer vendor that supplied the Mpumalanga education department with 347 PCs, as well an Erasmia-based computer company where counterfeit and stolen software was found.

ILDA JACOBS, Washington DC | Monday A SOUTH African woman’s 25-day hunger strike has succeeded in forcing the California Department of Corrections to admit that her husband was wrongly classified as a gangster. Lara Johnson, 35, originally from Volksrust in Mpumalanga, married African American Demian Johnson in a prison waiting room three years ago after […]

A MAN accused of driving drunk and crashing into a minibus full of school children was let off the hook in the Nelspruit District Court because the police failed to take statements from the survivors. Carl Furter, 34, was never asked to plead on a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol. Police allegedly […]

ZIMBABWES main opposition party, which has fiercely opposed President Robert Mugabe’s land reforms, has given cautious support to the government’s new scheme of resettlement based on commercial operation. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has previously criticised the programme promoted by Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), which involves taking away land mainly from […]

OWN CORRESPONDENTS, Kinshasa | Monday ANGOLA, Namibia and Zimbabwe have called for new peace efforts to end conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo following the slaying of its president Laurent Kabila in what an advisor says was “a premeditated attack”. Presidents Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, Sam Nujoma of Namibia and Robert Mugabe […]

CLAIRE KEETON and OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Monday PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki’s bizarre decision to exclude the country’s leading anti-corruption watchdog from a probe into the states shady R43bn arms deal has raised fresh doubts over his commitment to transparency. Mbeki has come under massive fire from opposition parties, religious groups and a groundswell of public […]

A 77-year-old man who survived having his throat slit is in a critical condition in a Johannesburg hospital. Luis Lopes, his wife Maria Lopes, who is also 77, and their 46-year-old domestic servant were attacked at the Lopes’ Bellevue East, Johannesburg, home on Sunday. Maria Lopes, whose throat was also slit, died. The domestic servant […]

THE earth’s atmosphere is warming faster than expected and evidence is mounting that human activity is responsible, says the United Nations Environment Programme. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now projects the earth’s average surface temperature will rise 1.4 to 5.8 deg C between 1990 and 2100, higher than its 1995 estimate of […]

ALGERIAN rebels blew up the entrance to a house and machine-gunned to death 11 members of one family, including four women and three children, in a poor suburb of Medea, south of Algiers. The attack came a day after the massacre of 23 shepherds near Chlef, about 220km west of Algiers. More than 60 people […]