British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Britain would urge the European Union to impose tougher sanctions on Zimbabwe, describing the situation there as ”appalling, disgraceful and utterly tragic”. ”We will press the EU to widen the political sanctions that were introduced in 2002 …,” Blair told Parliament during his weekly question-and-answer session.
Chinese cemeteries are selling paper replicas of Viagra pills to be burned for dead relatives as a wish for satisfying sex in the afterlife, state media reported on Wednesday. Customers are snapping up the paper Viagra ahead of the annual Tombsweeping Festival on April 5, the Nanjing Morning News reported.
The head of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, Archbishop Pius Ncube, criticised the South African government on Tuesday for failing to rein in Harare’s hard-line President Robert Mugabe. ”They are in the best position to put pressure on Zimbabwe, to call for sanctions if necessary,” the archbishop of Bulawayo said on the SAfm radio station.
Newspaper reports suggesting something untoward in a deal between Russian companies and the African National Congress-aligned Chancellor House firm are nonsense, the ANC said on Tuesday. ”It is a deal between private companies that has nothing to do with government or the ANC,” said ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, adding that he did not want to comment on it.
The articulation of the affirmative-action programme in South Africa as a ”jobs-for-pals” scheme by the ruling African National Congress is doing ”immeasurable damage” to the South African economy, Independent Democrats (ID) leader Patricia de Lille has argued.
African National Congress politician and businessman Chris Nissen said he had returned the R370 000 he was paid for consultancy work to the trustees of murdered mining magnate Brett Kebble’s estate, media reports said on Tuesday. The money was repaid last year.
South Africa pushed on Monday for a 90-day freeze of Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for a simultaneous suspension of United Nations sanctions that the Security Council is looking to toughen. The 90-day, simultaneous suspension was contained in a series of South African amendments to a draft resolution agreed by six major powers last week.
Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana has asked the National Skills Authority to investigate allegations of financial irregularities at the Mappp-Seta, a senior government official told <i>eMedia</i>.
The national executive committee (NEC) of the African National Congress (ANC) on Saturday rejected the conclusions of a task-team report on the hoax email saga. The NEC meeting focused primarily on the political preparations for the ANC’s 52nd national conference, which will take place in December.
Wartime French Resistance hero Lucie Aubrac, who famously rescued her husband in a daring attack on a German convoy, died on March 14 in a Paris hospital at the age of 94. In 1943, Aubrac was with a group of fighters who ambushed a truck bearing Raymond Aubrac and 13 other resistance members from Gestapo headquarters in Lyon.