Cape Town

Political parties should be funded equitably by the state and private companies, Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille said on Wednesday. ”Fifty percent of the funds should be allocated on an equal basis to all political parties,” De Lille said in a speech prepared for delivery at a meeting on party funding in Cape Town.

After more than a decade on the beat in central Cape Town, the City Community Patrol Board must cease its activities by Friday, according to the South African Police Service. However, there was unhappiness with the closure of the rent-a-cops, as they were commonly known, with 70 employees not absorbed into the police.

There can be no solution to the Middle East conflict without the involvement of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, President Thabo Mbeki said on Tuesday. Mbeki was speaking at the United Nations African Meeting in Support of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

A Cape Town man who shot dead his nine-year-old daughter and wounded his wife before shooting himself, died at the Groote Schuur hospital on Monday night. Hospital spokesperson Leigh Pollio said on Tuesday that Peter Prinsloo (59) died at 7.40pm.

The African Court for Human and Peoples’ Rights, one of the main organs designed to deal with human rights abuses on the African continent, is struggling to see the light of day. Commentators are suggesting it could only be formed next year, more than 12 months after its intended establishment.

South Africa’s First Lady Zanele Mbeki was the guest of honour at a quayside ceremony in the Cape Town harbour on Tuesday to name a new R250-million purpose-built coastal tanker, the Southern Unity. Just under 176m long, the tanker’s freshly painted red hull, blue deck and white superstructure loomed over the guests and dignatories.

A secret French-South African anti-poaching operation in the Southern Ocean has led to the arrest of an fishing vessel — but only after shots were fired at the suspected poacher when it refused to stop. The arrest took place about 5 000km south-east of Cape Town, within the economic exclusion zone around the French Antarctic island of Kerguelen.

The South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) said that it may pursue industrial action should its dispute with the South African Local Government Association (Salga) not be resolved.

South Africa’s oldest lesbian and gay service organisation, the Triangle Project, on Friday reacted with outrage at a website that called for the ”reclaiming of Cape Town from the homosexual plague”.

Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon has rejected what he called President Thabo Mbeki’s attempt to label the DA as a party from the ”right”. Leon said in the president’s ”idealised world” every intervention by the state is necessary and beneficial, but the ”cold reality” of South Africa’s experience indicates otherwise.

The National Assembly has given the nod to an ac hoc parliamentary committee report expressing its disapproval of the actions of National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka which had prejudiced the dignity of Deputy President Jacob Zuma. This boils down to a mild rebuke of the actions of Ngcuka.

South African Aids activists sang and danced through the streets of Cape Town on Thursday as part of a worldwide campaign to get the United States government to reduce military spending. Some 500 marchers made their way to the US consulate in central Cape Town to deliver a letter addressed to President George Bush calling for less spending on the military and more on fighting diseases such as HIV/Aids.

Any campaign to lower the cost of books should look at their whole pricing structure and not just VAT, Education Minister Naledi Pandor said on Thursday. Asked whether she supported calls for VAT on books to be scrapped, Pandor said she liked to start ”where things begin”, which was the cost of books and the markups added by those who were selling them.

”I am young — but up here is old,” says an 11-year-old girl working as a prostitute in Cape Town, pointing to her head — one of many images in hard-hitting footage on the sex industry, screened at the opening of a conference on human trafficking in South Africa on Tuesday.

Mineral and Energy Affairs Minister Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka told members of Parliament on Tuesday that a new power station will bring about R10-billion into the South African economy. The minister said South Africa would be able to achieve universal access to electricity within an eight-year timeframe, as announced by President Thabo Mbeki.

The fate of one of southern Africa’s oldest nomadic tribes, the San, could be sealed when the Botswana High Court hears argument on the issue of ancestral land rights. The court case, which commences on July 5 with an in loco inspection, could decide the future of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen communities.

South Africa needs to improve communications to dispel misconceptions among potential foreign investors about government’s black economic empowerment (BEE) programme, President Thabo Mbeki said on Sunday. Briefing the media after the seventh presidential International Investment Council meeting in Cape Town, he said there was an imbalance between the perceptions and the reality of South Africa among some abroad.

South African Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has announced that she is to introduce community service for professional nurses in January 2005. Speaking in her vote in an extended public committee on Thursday, Tshabalala-Msimang noted that this applied to nurses with four years of training.