SOUTH Africa has to tighten immigration laws to discourage false asylum claims and marriages of convenience, says Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Some 35% of the 75 000 asylum seekers currently in the country were not genuine, he said, and current migration laws are so badly abused that 60% of migration applications were by spouses […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT with AFRICA EYE NEWS SERVICE and AFP, Johannesburg | Wednesday IN two separate rape cases, an Mpumalanga man has been arrested for raping his eight-year-old daughter for the past two weeks, while a pregnant girl who was raped by Angolan government soldiers at the weekend has died from her injuries. The man from […]

JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Wednesday MPUMALANGA is sitting on a race war time bomb where farm labourers still live like slaves, are denied basic health care and are treated worse than mechanical implements such as tractors, the leading political parties in the province have warned. The situation is so bad in some areas that racial […]

A DIVING safari company has hunted and killed a suspected man-eating shark off Dar es Salaam’s main beach in Tanzania after it allegedly ate five people. The pregnant 400kg shark, believed to be responsible for the death of a 28-year-old student last week, was killed after “a hell of pursuit” off the popular Coco Beach. […]

SOWETO councillor Trevor Ngwane will protest against globalisation in the US and Canada later this month when he speaks in the Challenging Globalisation at Grassroots campaign. The month-long campaign is being driven by Global-South, a movement against corporate globalisation, and aims to generate solidarity for social justice movements in South Africa and Bolivia. The tour […]

A WARRANT of arrest has been issued against Presidential spokesman Parks Mankahlana after he failed to turn up for a child maintenance hearing in Mpumalanga. Mankahlana had denied fathering a child by Thalitha Mthethwa nine years ago, but a paternity test proved he was the father. Mthethwa, a teacher, and Mankahlana lived together for two […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Wednesday SOUTH Africa’s foreign affairs department has launched a programme to ensure that blacks will fill 80% of the posts in the country’s diplomatic missions within the next 12 months, Business Day newspaper reports. The newspaper quoted foreign affairs director-general Sipho Pityana as saying that at the beginning of the […]

ISLAMIC extremists massacred 14 members of the same family overnight after attacking their home in north-western Algeria as they slept. The assailants raided the house of an agricultural worker in the isolated hamlet of Ouled Amrane, and killed six women, four children and four men, setting about them with axes and knives as well as […]

THE newly-elected government in Mauritius is to wage war on corruption in an effort to restore the island’s economy to health. President Cassam Uteem told parliament the country’s finances needed to be cleaned up and judicial and economic reforms enacted. Uteem said the budget deficit was unsustainable, public debt was running at unprecedented levels and […]

EARLY harvests are improving food supplies in the west of Kenya but shortages in drought ravaged regions are getting worse, the government said. Harvesting in the breadbasket region has been promising, but food shortages are expected to persist in the arid Eastern, North Eastern and parts of the Rift Valley and these areas will continue […]