The Eastern Cape province has defended a planned visit to Germany by its premier and senior officials in what has been dubbed a ”Soccer World Cup junket” by a watchdog body. The Public Service Accountability Monitor said the ”junket” should be declared fruitless and wasteful expenditure by the auditor general.
”We are here in Africa. We live in the mainstream, we pay taxes like everybody else in the mainstream, we relate with people in the mainstream. We are a naturally occurring phenomenon in the universe,” said activist Donna Smith of gay people in Africa, at the second Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights this week in Nairobi.
The Siamese twin girls born in the Arwyp hospital in Kempton Park on Wednesday night are doing well, the hospital said on Friday night. Hospital superintendent Wiam Stander said the babies will ideally stay in the hospital for the next four to six months while scans and tests are done to facilitate their separation.
A construction worker trapped when a wet concrete slab collapsed was found dead at midnight on Friday after hours of searching. ”Just after midnight we found the body,” Johannesburg emergency services spokesperson Malcolm Midgley said on Saturday. ”He was in several metres of concrete that were starting to set.”
The son of former Cape Town mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo, Onele Mfeketo, was on Friday let off the hook on a shoplifting charge in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court. Mfeketo was scheduled to go on trial, charged with stealing potato crisps, fruit juice and maize meal from the V&A Waterfront’s Pick ‘n Pay in May last year.
Seven members of a fringe religious group were being held in Miami on Friday after being charged with planning a terrorist attack they hoped would be ”greater than 9/11”, starting with the destruction of the United States’s tallest building, the Sears Tower in Chicago. The men are accused of conspiring ”to work under al-Qaeda’s direction and control” to wage war against the US.
Managers can help South Africa overcome such crippling problems as poverty, racial divisions and resistance to gender equality, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday. He was addressing members of the Black Management Forum at the forum’s 30th-anniversary celebrations held at Emperor’s Palace near Kempton Park.
The Guantánamo Bay prison regime could be on the verge of closure. Within the past two weeks, United States President George Bush has said three times that he would like to close the camp, but was waiting for direction from the US Supreme Court. ”I’d like it to be over with,” the president said.
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A dubious penalty won and taken by Andriy Shevchenko was enough to see Ukraine through to the next round of the World Cup at their first attempt as they beat 10-man Tunisia 1-0 on Friday. In Group H’s other match, Spain, who also go through to the next round, defeated Saudi Arabia 1-0.
Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Friday said there had been no word from South African authorities on a fresh probe into the mysterious death of Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, during the apartheid era. ”Sadly enough, we haven’t had an answer as yet,” Guebuza said.