OWN CORRESPONDENTS, Johannesburg | Wednesday AIDS activists have dimissed the South African government’s new ”back to basics” guidelines in the battle against the disease as ”fatally flawed”, with key anti-Aids drugs conspicuously absent from its strategy to prevent and treat HIV. Although the new guidelines acknowledge that HIV causes Aids, they will limit the use […]

SOUTH African Breweries Plc says Malcolm Wyman, currently group corporate finance and development officer, will become group financial director from March 1, 2001. Wyman, who also keeps his current responsibilities, replaces Nigel Cox, who will take up the position of financial director of SAB International in Europe. Cox will move to Budapest and give up […]

THE World Health Organisation has urged tougher anti-tobacco policies in Africa, but the OAU is worried the drive could undermine political and economic stability if farmers are not given alternatives. Parliamentarians and health experts from 21 African English-speaking countries are meeting in Nairobi as the WHO whips up support for its tobacco control campaign. The […]

ZIMBABWE’S opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is to launch unprecedented impeachment proceedings against President Robert Mugabe ”mainly to force a public debate about the president’s behaviour”. The MDC, which is posing the strongest challenge yet to Mugabe’s 20-year rule, holds 57 of the 150 seats in parliament, meeting the one-third requirement to propose impeachment, […]

SWAZILAND’S constitutional affairs and justice minister, Chief Maweni Simelane, has stunned the House of Senate by defending a man who mutilated his wife’s genitals in a fit of jealousy. Simelane was responding to senate calls for a retrial of 55-year-old Philemon Dlamini, who was let off with a R120 fine by a traditional court for […]

AN Inkatha Freedom Party local government election candidate was shot dead after a campaign meeting at the weekend. Justice Thula Mthimkhulu Radebe, 58, was gunned down by two men at his supermarket in Vosloorus on the East Rand. Nothing was taken from the shop. – AFP

MALAWI’S Supreme Court has upheld the results of the June 1999 presidential election here, ending a 16-month dispute over the vote’s outcome. The opposition had argued in its legal challenge that President Bakili Muluzi did not win the election because he failed to win votes from more than half of the eligible electorate. – AFP

PHILLIP NKOSI, Nelspruit | Tuesday SUSPENDED Mpumalanga Parks Board (MPB) chief Alan Gray, who faces 77 criminal charges for allegedly embezzling R2m of taxpayer funds, has been paid his full salary of R44000 per month – over R1,1m – since he was suspended in September 1998. Gray will this week finally face an internal disciplinary […]

ONE death and a further 11 cases of the gruesome Ebola disease have been reported in northern Uganda, bringing the total number of known infected people in the outbreak, which has killed 55 people, to 160. No cure exists for Ebola, a viral infection which causes fever, diarrhoea, vomiting and eventual severe haemorrhaging of internal […]