The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has rejected a claim by the Department of Health that it is reconsidering a government’s invitation to attend the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/Aids. After initially being barred from going to the special session, the TAC last week turned down the department’s offer to be one of 14 civil society organisations to join the South African delegation.
The union representing striking security guards and their employers need to resolve their wage dispute without the Minister of Labour’s intervention, he said on Tuesday. Minister Membathisi Mdladlana said that both parties — and not himself — held the key to an amicable solution, he said in a statement sent from Cairo, where he was attending a labour summit.
No charges of corruption or tender rigging were pending against any National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) employees, NPA head Vusi Pikoli said on Tuesday. He rejected a Sunday Times report that NPA chief executive officer Marion Sparg and her ”entire executive management team” faced such charges.
The Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has announced that women will be allowed to attend football matches in big stadiums for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Under a decree reported on state television on Monday, the president has ordered the head of the country’s sports organisation to provide separate areas for women.
It is worthy of a political thriller. The political elite in Paris is gripped by the search for an anonymous poison-pen writer who concocted fake allegations against leading politicians and businessmen. The so-called ”Clearstream” affair is the latest battle in the bitter rivalry between the presidential pretender, the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin.
More than 1 000 Iraqis who live south of Baghdad within the bombed and looted complex that was once the centre of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear programme are at acute risk of radioactive poisoning, the United Nations’ nuclear authority said on Monday.
The architect Frank Gehry unveiled plans on Monday to build a 50-storey, glass-encased tower in the heart of central Los Angeles as the centrepiece of an ambitious ,8-billion redevelopment plan. The plan aims to restore a vibrant and thriving downtown to a city many say lacks a civic centre.
Iran’s nuclear programme is the biggest threat to Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, the Israeli government stated on Monday, as the Iranian president renewed his calls for the dissolution of the Jewish state. As Israel prepared to mark Holocaust memorial day, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, further stirred international outrage by calling on Israeli Jews to be resettled in Europe.
Prosecutors in the trial of Saddam Hussein played a recording on Monday said to be of a phone conversation in which the ousted Iraqi leader agreed to ”change the social reality” in the Shia town of Dujail. The alleged phone call related to a crackdown launched in Dujail after Saddam’s motorcade was shot at in July 1982.
Kenneth Lay, the former Enron chief, on Monday told a courtroom that his pursuit of the American dream had ended in an ”American nightmare” after the business collapsed amid allegations of fraud in 2001. Taking the witness stand for the first time as his trial on fraud charges moved into its 13th week, Lay said he was eager to set the record straight.