MINING firm Billiton said on Sunday its investors had thrown their weight behind its proposed US$28bn merger with Australia’s BHP. Billiton said votes representing more than half of its share capital had already been received and nearly all were in favour of the merger proposal that will be put to a shareholders’ meeting on Tuesday. […]

A DIVING team located a school of coelacanths – an elusive prehistoric fish known as a “living fossil” – in Indian Ocean waters off eastern South Africa on Monday and is filming them, SABC radio reported. Coelacanths, a 400 million year-old species, were thought to have become extinct 70 or 80-million years ago until one […]

IN an official visit to Colombia, South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma on Monday signed an agreement with his South American counterpart Gustavo Bell to cooperate in the fight against drug trafficking. The document shows both countries’ intent to establish a bilateral committee of top-level officials enjoined to find solutions to the drug problem and […]

THE South African Communist Party (SACP), which is part of the ruling alliance in government, cautioned on Sunday against rushing ahead with privatisations. The government hopes to raise 18 billion rand from the proceeds of the sale of state assets in the 2001/02 fiscal year, led by an initial public offering for telecoms utility Telkom, […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, PRETORIA | Tuesday SOUTH Africa’s central bank governor Tito Mboweni said on Monday in Pretoria the rand is not a one-way bet despite its steep depreciation last year. “Notwithstanding the volatility in the exchange rate of the rand, we are convinced that there is every reason to be confident regarding the future path […]

ZIMBABWE’s government faced renewed pressure this week to devalue the country’s embattled currency with warnings that attempts to prop up the Zim Dollar were seriously harming exports. Leading Zimbabwean economist Eric Bloch said on Tuesday that the country’s fiscal policy had overvalued the Zimbabwe Dollar (Z$) by up to 50% against the currencies of major […]

VORACIOUS caterpillars are ravaging plantations and smallholdings in Cameroon’s Eastern and Southern Provinces, eating almost all the plants and crops they reach, the agriculture ministry said on Monday. “Not a single green plant is spared, from bananas to cocoyams to groundnuts,” said a plantation owner reached by telephone in the Ngomedzap region, about 100km south […]

DIMENSON Data (Didata) said on Monday it and Internet consultant Proxicom In have agreed to merge in a deal involving South Africa’s biggest IT company paying an aggregate $448 million for the US firm. Under the deal Didata would give Proxicom shareholders $7,50 in cash for each share. The purchase price would be $378-million after […]

TWENTY-five people are feared dead after their boat sank off the east coast of Madagascar last week, including 18 players and officials from a local soccer club and two Frenchmen, officials said on Monday. The boat sank on Thursday with some 41 people on board, including nine crew members, while it was travelling from Soanierana-Ivongo […]

A RWANDAN nun testified on Monday that a former fellow nun at a Rwanda convent encouraged refugees who had sought shelter there to leave in order to spare the nuns’ lives during the country’s 1994 genocide. Sister Gertrude, former mother superior of the convent, and Sister Maria Kisito are accused of premeditated murder and crimes […]