Ukraine’s former interior minister Yuriy Kravchenko was found dead on Friday in an apparent suicide only hours before prosecutors were expected to grill him about the 2000 slaying of a journalist, dealing a significant blow to an investigation that could implicate former president Leonid Kuchma.
With five leaders killed since November last year, the Inkatha Freedom Party is calling for action on political violence in KwaZulu-Natal, but some think it might be opening a can of worms. KwaZulu-Natal Premier Sibusiso Ndebele announced a commission of inquiry into violence in the province this week.
Governments could allow up to 89-million HIV/Aids infections to develop virtually unchallenged in Africa over the next 20 years by failing to take effective measures and boost funding, a United Nations study issued on Friday warned. Half of these could be averted if leaders take the right steps and significant foreign aid is forthcoming, said the report.
A practical joker scared Welsh pub-goers by placing a 60cm snake in the coin-return slot of a jukebox, it was reported on Friday. Fourteen-year-old publican’s daughter Stacey Caldwell got the fright of her life when she found a boa constrictor coiled up in the coin-return slot in the pub in Cym, South Wales.
The dissolution of the former ruling apartheid New National Party and its inclusion into the African National Congress will send ”a very powerful message about the extraordinary ability of our people to give real meaning to the goals of national reconciliation”, said President Thabo Mbeki on Friday in his regular internet column, ANC Today.
Trade unions on Friday said they will protect Durban Roodepoort Deep (DRD) miners in the North West from retrenchment following DRD’s warning that production must go up or they will lose their jobs. The National Union of Mineworkers believes DRD does not really want to mine in South Africa and wants to shift focus to Australasia.
The widow of a former body guard of South African Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni has instituted a claim for more than R2,9-million from a former Pretoria traffic officer and the Tshwane city council. Myra Smith’s husband, Davis Smith, was 29 when he was shot dead on the N1 highway near Rooihuiskraal on May 26 2000.
About 350 students of the University of the Free State handed over a memorandum on Friday demanding an end to the promotion of Afrikaans as a compulsory medium of instruction at the main campus. The students marched peacefully to the main campus entrance, before the memorandum was handed to university rector Frederick Fourie.
Sport in South Africa has fallen victim to African National Congress ”doublethink”, and the contradictions are crippling it, says Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon. ”Winning is losing, the ANC seems to believe. Or, as [the minister of sport] so bluntly put it … we should be willing to ‘sacrifice winning in the name of transformation’,” Leon says in his weekly newsletter.
The author Breyten Breytenbach said Senegalese police moved in on Friday morning to evict the Gorée Institute, of which he is director, from its offices on the former slave island of the same name. Though he said he does not know the reason for the eviction, it comes amid privatisation of state properties in Senegal.