OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday YOU’RE not even safe from the taxman’s prying fingers in cyberspace. For the first time, tax returns will require full disclosure of sales and purchases made over the Internet. The SA Revenue Service has moved to close a loophole that may have seen billions of rands slip out of country, […]

LUNGA MASUKU AND OWN CORRESPONDENT, Manzini | Thursday SWAZILANDS’S police have threatened to use force when workers embark on a crippling nationwide strike to protest against a controversial industrial relations law. The Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU) called for a work stoppage on September 28 after the government failed to meet a deadline to […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT and REUTERS, Paros, Greece | Thursday AT least six South Africans are known to have survived the Greek ferry disaster near the Aegean Sea island of Paros, in which the death toll has risen to 62 as rescuers continue to pull bodies from the water. They are Charlene Cooper, Louis van Wyk, Pieter […]

PETER CUNLIFFE-JONES, Abuja | Thursday ONCE rivals, South Africa and Nigeria are now partners in economic development, with South Africans leading the new foreign investors in Nigeria’s almost untapped non-oil economy, officials say. “There is a consensus in South Africa that there is a tremendous potential in Nigeria. It is still uncharted waters, but the […]

JUSTIN ARENSTEIN, Nelspruit | Thursday MPUMALANGA’S “obscene” R800m budget for a lavish new legislature complex – including 350 imported executive chairs at R12_ 000 each – could instead have been used to repair all flood damaged roads in the province, says Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon. Leon said it was obscene that “people living less […]

ADE OBISESAN, Lagos | Thursday NIGERIAN President Olusegun Obasanjo, who has come under fire for failing to back his anti-corruption talk with action, will this week take his first major step to repair his country’s battered reputation by inaugurating an anti-graft commission. Many Nigerians, including human rights activists and local journalists, have criticised Obasanjo for […]

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday CONVICTED killer Ferdi Barnard has confessed to murdering anti-apartheid lawyer David Webster outside his Johannesburg home in 1989 on orders from the shadowy Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB). Barnard told a Truth and Reconciliation Commission amnesty hearing that he conducted the assassination with the help of colleague Calla Botha on […]

FOUR southern African countries have joined forces against an international syndicate of smugglers that is costing their formal economies millions of rands every year. Customs officials from Swaziland, South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have agreed to work together to smash the syndicate, which smuggles a range of goods for sale at deflated prices in the […]

A HOME science experiment ended tragically when a teenage girl was electrocuted by a garden fence in Northern Province. Elizabeth Zitha, 14, of Giyani, touched the fence without knowing that it was wired to a wall plug in the house. A powerful electric current threw Zitha a few metres through the air and she was […]

REUTERS, Abidjan | Thursday IVORY Coast’s military ruler, General Robert Guei, has completed a cabinet reshuffle prompted by an alleged assassination attempt, promoting loyalists and sacking those marked as opponents. Guei’s move came as his military junta agreed to study a series of proposals put forward by African leaders to resolve the country’s political crisis, […]