The last hour of captivity for Alan Johnston was perhaps the worst. His guard burst into his room in the early hours of Wednesday morning and told him to get dressed. His regular captor, "an extraordinarily moody man with dark rages", had been joined by some new gunmen who looked "totally wired".
Lesotho has an estimated HIV/Aids prevalence of 30%, the third highest in the world, as well as alarming rates of tuberculosis. Without fully fledged and all-encompassing aid, the entire Basotho nation is set to be extinct within 30 years. Thijs van der Post travels to Lesotho’s mountains to meet those who are trying to make a difference.
Just as the London bombs in the summer of 2005 were Blair’s bombs, the inevitable consequence of his government’s lawless attack on Iraq, so the potential bombs in the summer of 2007 are Brown’s bombs. Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor as prime minister, has been an unerring supporter of the unprovoked bloodbath whose victims now equal those of the Rwandan genocide.
Much tighter control of the spies at the National Intelligence Agency is needed to prevent them from abusing their broad domestic security mandate, civil society and media groups have told a ministerial review commission, set up by Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils in the wake of the ”hoax email” and illegal surveillance scandals.
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The only people who said crime was out of control in the Western Cape were the Democratic Alliance, Western Cape provincial community safety minister Leonard Ramatlakane said on Wednesday. He said calls for him to step down were ”frivolous” and something to which he would not respond.
While many people dread Friday the 13th, for father and son Norman and Patrick Pieterse it may just be their lucky day. On July 13, Cape Town Regional Court magistrate Johnny Vermeulen is to pronounce them guilty — or not -– of aggravated armed robbery.
The Afrikaner enclave of Orania and the Northern Cape government have agreed that Orania’s quest for self-determination should be discussed at all government levels. Chairperson of the Orania representative council Prinsloo Potgieter said this was the outcome of a meeting between the council and premier Dipuo Peters.
A part of the eNatis website appears to have been hacked, according to media reports. However, the Transport Department’s spokesperson Collen Msibi played down the supposed breach said this would not affect the functioning of the controversial electronic National Transport Information System (eNatis) system.
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel on Wednesday called for a deepening of corporate governance and accountability, saying it was necessary to understand that sound corporate governance was not enough. Manuel was addressing a conference of the International Corporate Governance Network in Cape Town.