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/ 7 November 2007
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said on Tuesday he was committed to the north-south peace deal that ended Africa’s longest civil war and there would be no return to hostilities after a crisis threatened the pact. ”I would like to assure you there will be no return to war whatsoever,” he said at a state banquet with South African President Thabo Mbeki.
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/ 6 November 2007
Sudan has asked South Africa to mediate on Darfur, Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said on Tuesday as attempts to end a conflict that has killed more than 200 000 and forced 2,5-million from their homes appeared to founder. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir met President Thabo Mbeki on Tuesday.
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/ 6 November 2007
Premier Soccer League (PSL) board members deserve to be rewarded with millions of rands for their role in securing the controversial Absa soccer sponsorship deal, MPs heard on Tuesday. ”They have done the best for football … and have acted in the best interest of the PSL,” league chairperson Irvin Khoza said.
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/ 6 November 2007
African National Congress (ANC) chairperson Mosiuoa Lekota has rejected allegations by Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille that the ANC and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund benefited inappropriately from the arms deal. De Lille on Tuesday said such allegations had been speculation up until now.
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/ 6 November 2007
South African medical authorities need to start thinking about tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/Aids as a single epidemic, rather than treating them separately, a TB expert said on Tuesday at a media briefing ahead of a major international conference on lung health, which begins in Cape Town on Thursday.
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/ 6 November 2007
Very few prisons test newly admitted prisoners for contagious and communicable diseases such as tuberculosis or Aids, according to the Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons’s 2006/7 annual report. The document also strongly criticises strip searches carried out on newly admitted prisoners.
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/ 6 November 2007
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and President Thabo Mbeki were meeting on Tuesday for talks expected to focus on tensions in southern Sudan and the deteriorating situation in Darfur. South Africa played a key role in forging the 2005 peace deal that ended 21 years of civil war in Sudan.
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/ 6 November 2007
The looming threat of an untreatable strain of tuberculosis emerging as the disease becomes ever more drug resistant will occupy the minds of about 3Â 000 experts at a conference in Cape Town this week. Though curable, more than 1,5-million people die of tuberculosis every year and growing numbers of patients do not react to standard drugs.
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/ 5 November 2007
Advocate Geoff Budlender will not be conducting the investigation into the City of Cape Town’s ”spy” affair, mayor Helen Zille announced on Monday. ”It has come to my attention that advocate Geoffrey Budlender previously provided advice to the legal adviser of the speaker regarding a potential interdict of councillor [Badih] Chaaban,” she said.
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/ 5 November 2007
The government is busy changing environmental legislation to ”streamline” further the way environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are carried out, Environmental Affairs Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk announced on Monday. ”Using EIAs as the only means of dealing with environmental impacts is severely limiting,” he said.
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/ 5 November 2007
African nations are failing to control tuberculosis and could be overwhelmed by drug resistant strains of the infectious lung disease, with dire implications for the war on HIV/Aids, a leading Aids activist said on Monday. ”The explosion of tuberculosis on the continent is combined with the explosion and advance of the HIV epidemic,” said Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign.
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/ 4 November 2007
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After eight years at the helm of Africa’s economic powerhouse, Thabo Mbeki cuts an increasingly lonely figure as the battle for the reins of the African National Congress (ANC) approaches its finale. As well as taking fresh blows from his political foes, the president has also become the target of senior ANC party members.
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/ 2 November 2007
Flights in and out of Cape Town International Airport were delayed on Friday after a plane became ”stuck” on a runway, the Airports Company South Africa said. Spokesperson Deidre Hendricks said in a statement that the plane ”got stuck on the main runway” just before 3pm.
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/ 2 November 2007
Those involved in the recent fierce debate over abalone needed to bear in mind the species was on the brink of extinction, major environmental organisations warned on Friday. The warning follows the delay of a ban on commercial trade and harvesting of the valuable shellfish in the face of strong opposition from those with permits to do so.
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/ 2 November 2007
There will be no cover-up in the alleged spy scandal involving the surveillance of Cape Town councillors, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Helen Zille vowed on Friday. ”Let me be clear. There will be no cover-up in this matter. If anyone in the city or the DA has broken any law, the police must lay a charge and we will deal with it head-on,” she said.
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/ 2 November 2007
A court challenge to Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk’s new abalone restrictions has been postponed for a month. Legal teams of the South African Abalone Industry Association and the state gathered at the Cape High Court on Friday morning for what was expected to be an application for an urgent interdict against the restrictions.
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/ 2 November 2007
Africa’s state-owned oil firms are taking a bigger role in the rush to tap the continent’s energy resources and threatening to upstage the Western majors who have dominated exploration and drilling for decades. Governments from Luanda to Lagos are pushing for greater control and laying down increasingly stringent rules for the international firms.
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/ 2 November 2007
The Department of Home Affairs is forging ahead with plans to introduce a smart-card identification system, Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said on Friday. ”It is clear to us that we have to move in this direction as quickly as possible,” she told a media briefing at Parliament.
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/ 2 November 2007
President Thabo Mbeki devoted a large part of his speech to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Friday to criticising the behaviour and ownership of the media. Speaking in Pniel, outside Stellenbosch, where the NCOP was holding a provincial sitting, he emphasised that the government has ”absolutely no intention to limit press freedom”.
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/ 2 November 2007
The Department of Home Affairs has ditched the South African Post Office (Sapo) as the distributor of its documents because of inefficiency. Initially, the Sapo contract with the department to deliver documents went very well, Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula told a media briefing at Parliament on Friday.
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/ 2 November 2007
Former anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman has not been given the recognition she deserves in the new South Africa, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi said on Friday. In a tribute to Suzman ahead of her 90th birthday next week, he said she had tirelessly used her position as MP during the Sixties and Seventies to break the apartheid mould.
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/ 1 November 2007
President Thabo Mbeki has ignored all written parliamentary questions addressed to him by the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Thursday. DA parliamentary leader Sandra Botha said Mbeki had not responded to all nine questions that the party had addressed to him this year.
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/ 1 November 2007
The release on bail of Najwa Petersen, accused of the murder of her entertainer husband, Taliep, was essential to save her young daughter from long-term emotional damage, Cape Town psychologist Rosa Bredenkamp told the Wynberg Regional Court on Thursday. Petersen has launched a second bail application after her first was rejected.
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/ 1 November 2007
Hammer murder accused Fred van der Vyver has lost a quarter of his weight since his girlfriend Inge Lotz was killed, the Cape High Court heard on Thursday. The revelation was made by the senior advocate in his defence team, Henri Viljoen, in closing argument. Van der Vyver is charged with killing Lotz in her Stellenbosch flat in March 2005.
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/ 1 November 2007
The government is to invest R100-million next year in six marine fish-farming projects, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk announced on Thursday. ”There are huge opportunities in marine aquaculture, which will not only reduce the pressure on wild stocks, but provide new economic opportunities,” he said.
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/ 1 November 2007
Félicien Kabuga has a reward of several million dollars on his head, and tops the list of fugitives of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Yet, he’s managed to escape justice for years. The ICTR was set up in northern Tanzania by the United Nations in 1995 to bring high-level perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide to justice.
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/ 31 October 2007
Murder accused Fred van der Vyver’s alibi had been proved beyond reasonable doubt and he should be found not guilty, his advocate told the Cape High Court on Wednesday. Van der Vyver (25) is accused of killing his student girlfriend Inge Lotz with a hammer at her Stellenbosch flat on the afternoon of March 16 2005.
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/ 31 October 2007
Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk still faces a court challenge from the abalone industry even though he backed down on Wednesday from a harvesting ban. The ban, prompted by rapidly declining stocks, was to have come into effect on Thursday. It would have halted all commercial harvesting of the threatened shellfish from the wild.
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/ 31 October 2007
The government’s key Working for Water programme, aimed at eradicating invasive alien plants that cause billions of rands’ damage to the economy each year, appears set to fall further and further behind in its efforts to contain the problem. Alien plants have so far invaded about 8% of the country.
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/ 31 October 2007
The European Union is threatening to ban the import of South African animal products because the government has failed to meet certain requirements agreed on five years ago, the Democratic Alliance said on Wednesday. The ban would cover South African beef, mutton, pork, chicken, ostrich and game products, among others.
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/ 31 October 2007
According to research, 70% of young children who have a parent in jail develop emotional problems, the Wynberg Regional Court heard from a psychiatrist on Wednesday. Rosa Bredenkamp was testifying before Western Cape Regional Court president Robert Henney in support of Najwa Petersen’s second bail application.
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/ 31 October 2007
Publication of the fact that a person is a client of a specific bank does not infringe privacy rights, according to Cape Deputy Judge President Jeanette Traverso. She made the finding in a written judgement, handed down this week, on a bid by FirstRand to prevent magazine noseweek publishing the names of clients involved in an allegedly dodgy tax scheme.