The African National Congress’s (ANC) policy conference, which will play a key role in deciding whether President Thabo Mbeki leads the party for a third term, gets under way in Midrand on Wednesday. About 1 500 delegates are expected at the four-day meeting at Gallagher Estate.
Police said inmates used pancake batter and toothpaste to cover a hole they made to allow a female inmate to slide into the next cell and join a male inmate. Inmates removed a block from the wall after making a digging tool with a nail, a wire from a light fixture and a toothbrush.
Severe cold and more snow is to hit large parts of the country later on Tuesday and Wednesday, the South African Weather Service has warned. It said temperatures will drop as low as minus nine degrees Celsius in places such as Sutherland in the Northern Cape. The town was blanketed in snow on Monday.
The Wynberg Regional Court in Cape Town was packed to capacity on Tuesday during the bail application of Najwa Petersen, who is alleged to have murdered her husband, popular entertainer Taliep Petersen. Magistrate Jackie Redelinghuys postponed the combined bail application of Petersen and her three alleged accomplices.
A roadside bomb explosion in the Somali capital on Tuesday killed five women and a man and wounded nine other people, witnesses said. The United States, meanwhile, called for the immediate release of opposition leaders arrested by the Somali government.
Confusion reigned at a press conference of the Western Cape branch of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in Cape Town on Tuesday. After calling a media briefing on the ”suspension” of the public-service strike, Cosatu organiser in the province Mike Louw told journalists: ”We’re not suspending the strike.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged world powers on Monday to take a tough line with Sudan if it balks at efforts to end bloodshed in Darfur, and argued that ignoring the situation was tantamount to complicity. ”Silence kills,” Sarkozy told ministers from 20 nations taking part in a one-day meeting in Paris to shore up the peace process in Darfur.
The African National Congress (ANC) is set to confront growing disquiet about the gap between rich and poor at a policy conference this week amid the biggest bout of worker unrest since apartheid. With the ANC due to elect a new leader at the end of the year, the four-day meeting will be partly seen as a test of strength between left-wing and pro-business elements.
An ambitious plan by the department of labour to create a massive database of all job vacancies in South Africa is being backed by official small business bodies, which raises serious questions about the state of small-business advocacy in the country. For several weeks, no media picked up on the strange plan after Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana announced it in his budget vote speech in Parliament.
Cherie Blair repeatedly urged her husband to sack Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown as she became incensed by his behaviour towards the prime minister, a family friend of the Blairs has disclosed. Barry Cox, who has known the couple for 30 years, said that while the relationship between Blair and his chancellor had been strained since the mid-1990s, the prime minister finally began to believe the worst of his successor during his final year in office.