SWAZILAND’S feared Makhundu 60-day detention-without-trial law is illegal and cannot be used to arrest political dissidents as threatened, the kingdom’s Attorney General Phesheya Dlamini said this week. The law was repealed by King Mswati III in September 1993 and would first have to be officially reinstated and gazetted before it could be used again. Swaziland […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday A FORMER Military Intelligence agent has revealed a bizarre scheme to kill an ANC spy with mamba poison to cover up the SA Defence Force’s role in the execution of five Mozambican resistance fighters. Testifying in the trial of apartheid chemical warfare expert Wouter Basson, former MI commander Cornelius Johannes […]

BRENDAN BOYLE, Pretoria | Thursday MIXED reactions have greeted a decision by a Pretoria court to grant bail to the six white police officers alleged to have set dogs on illegal job-seekers. While demonstrators outside the court shouted “one settler, one bullet” and demanded the six be jailed, the accused’s delighted families said they would […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday A SOUTH African farmers’ union has urged its members to improve their markmanship to counter continuing attacks by criminals. “We are encouraging farmers unequivocally to behave as if a national state of emergency is in place,” the Transvaal Agricultural Union said in a statement. Latest statistics show that 88 South […]

EMSIE FERREIRA, Johannesburg | Thursday CHILD sex trafficking – with children as young as four – is on the rise in South Africa, driven by deepening poverty that sometimes sees a family force a child into prostitution as its only source of income, says a report released this week. The report says there are an […]

FLIES and black cockroaches, possibly attracted by corpses of victims of Angola’s civil war, are invading the central Angolan town of Cuito, state-run radio reported. Health authorities fear residents who have survived the warfare could suffer new problems caused by the insects, the report said. A group of experts has launched a study into the […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday THE Denel group this week an agreement in Kuala Lumpur with the government of Malaysia for the supply of artillery systems to the Malaysian armed forces. The contract, valued at $50m, provides for delivery of 22 units of the South African-developed 155mm 45-calibre G5 Mark 3 towed artillery system, along […]

RESEARCHERS say they have discovered traces of cocaine in 4000-year-old Egyptian mummies, which they call evidence of contact with American cultures centuries before Christopher Columbus. The decade-long study languished “under pressure from people with obscure interests who don’t accept changes in the interpretation of history,” researcher Svetlana Balabanova said from Frankfurt, Germany. Cocaine is synthesized […]

THREE men cut off an aspirant sangoma’s testicle and left him lying in agony in the veld for three nights. Chuchi Ronald Maluleke, 32, was undergoing training as a sangoma in the Northern Province when he was attacked when he went to relieve himself on Friday night. Two held him down while the third cut […]

AT least 95 people have died of yellow fever in an epidemic that broke out in central Guinea last month. The epidemic is centred in Mamou, 280km east of the capital Conakry, and has spread to Labe and Koubia in the same region, the relief agency Hopital Sans Frontiere (Hospital Without a Border) said. Yellow […]