Essop Pahad has a communications headache. In public he’ll only talk about the media’s problems. In reality, it’s him who has the bigger challenge. As President Thabo Mbeki’s right-hand man, Pahad is Minister in the Presidency, in charge of government communications. Last week, he told Parliament how all this was going (very well), and assessed the media’s performance (not doing too well).
World powers gathered in London on Wednesday to try to break a deadlock over how to stop Iran enriching uranium, as Tehran again warned against military intervention. Senior officials from the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia and China will discuss a European proposal at the closed-door talks.
The horror stories have become platitudes — a nine-month-old baby allegedly gang-raped, a pensioner raped by her grandson — to make the interminable list lend weight to perceptions of South Africa as a world rape capital. In the Western Cape, police statistics show that rape was the only contact-crime category to increase, by 8,2%, from 2003/04 to 2004/05.
A new variation of card skimming at automated teller machines (ATMs), which gives criminals access to customers’ bank accounts, has gripped the country, Absa said on Wednesday. The thieves, using a hand-held device, make a duplicate copy of the customer’s card, giving them full access to the customer’s account.
Security company Omega International Associates has denied its employees arrested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were involved in a coup plot. The Department of Foreign Affairs said on Wednesday that 26 people were arrested in the DRC on Friday on allegations of ”destabilisation of government institutions”.
The South African Air Force on Wednesday took delivery of its first two Hawk Mark 120 lead-in fighter trainers. The air force will receive 10 of the aircraft from Denel and BAE Systems in the next few weeks. Parts of the aircraft are locally manufactured, others imported and the assembly is done in South Africa under British supervision.
Rival militiamen renewed fighting on Wednesday on the northern edge of Somalia’s lawless capital, witnesses and medical sources said. More than 140 people — mostly non-combatants caught in the crossfire — were killed in eight days of fighting in Mogadishu earlier this month between Islamic militias and a rival alliance of secular warlords.
The increase in South Africa’s consumer price index excluding mortgage rate changes (CPIX) for metro and other areas, which is used by the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) for its inflation target, was up 3,7% year-on-year in April after a 3,8% increase in March, Statistics South Africa said on Wednesday.
An al-Qaeda-linked umbrella group in Iraq on Wednesday denied any link to a suspect, whose alleged confessions were aired on Jordanian television, in an internet statement posted on an Islamist website. "We don’t even know the individual shown on Jordanian television," the Mujahedin Consultative Council said.
Jurors deliberated for a fifth day on Wednesday in the fraud trial of former Enron chief executives Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, after a separate trial of Lay before a judge on banking charges concluded. The eight women and four men, who have already debated for about 24 hours over four days, have given no indication of their progress.