Police are to probe the cause of Thursday morning’s horrific bus crash near Bethlehem, eastern Free State, for the victims of which sympathy and financial assistance has poured in.
Police divers began searching for more bodies in the Saulspoort Dam outside Bethlehem at 8am on Friday after Thursday’s horror bus accident. Bethlehem emergency services confirmed that 51 bodies had been recovered so far.
Sixty-three people had been confirmed dead by Thursday afternoon after the bus they were travelling in plunged into a dam near Bethlehem in the eastern Free State, according to African National Congress.
80 feared dead in horror bus crash
Regret, shock, sympathy and condolences for the families of the estimated 80 people feared dead in a bus accident were expressed by President Thabo Mbeki and acting transport minister Jeff Radebe.
The Pan Africanist Congress has suspended Limpopo MPL Maxwell Nemadzivhanani for allegedly disrupting the party’s national audit committee on March 23.
Brothers John and Dave Varty won interim relief on Friday in their court case over a controversial tiger project against investors Li Quan and Stuart Bray.
A number of illegal explosive devices were found on a farm belonging to a former military instructor near Warden over the weekend, say eastern Free State police.
Free State Agriculture (FSA) announced on Tuesday it is to take a local council to court over its imposition of land tax.
The Limpopo province has the lowest concentration of doctors in South Africa, with just 9,5 for every 100 000 of the population, according to figures released by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
The US gun industry could be granted immunity from litigation if a bill promoted by the National Rifle Association becomes law. Relatives of victims of the Washington sniper are leading a campaign to stop the bill.
Free State health MEC Auma Tsopo on Friday announced that nevirapine for pregnant women and rapid test kits were now available at all hospitals and health complexes in the province.
Girls as young as 13 and 14 years regularly fall pregnant at Free State schools, according to provincial legislature report tabled this week.
Plans to send over R85-million worth of South African grain to Zimbabwe are well underway and the first maize delivery is expected to be ready for distribution by the end of the week.
Controversy over rural security has deepened in South Africa with a government decision to phase out a paramilitary force that was part of the apartheid state’s security apparatus.
Five people were shot and killed when a gunman went on the rampage in Bochabela township of Mangaung, Bloemfontein on Tuesday night, southern Free State police said on Wednesday.
The legal battle between wildlife filmmaker John Varty and foreign investors Li Quan and Stuart Bray over a controversial tiger project, will resume next week after the Johannesburg High Court postponed their ‘cat-fight’ case on Tuesday.
Gauteng MPL Temba Sono announced on Tuesday he was leaving the Democratic Alliance to join the new Independent Democrats with former Pan Africanist Congress MP Patricia de Lille.
Gauteng MPL Themba Sono announced on Tuesday he was leaving the Democratic Alliance (DA) to join the new Independent Democrats (ID) with former Pan Africanist Congress MP Patricia de Lille.
South Africa’s rural municipalities are losing the battle to provide basic services, says a report released by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) on Thursday.
The police have stepped up patrols in Ficksburg in the eastern Free State after the murder in the area on Friday of a Chinese businessman, a policeman said on Monday. The man is the fourth businessmen to have been killed in the town recently.
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/ 28 February 2003
Queues for the new credit-card licences are winding around the block at testing stations around South Africa as the clock ticks towards the final countdown at midnight on Friday.
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/ 17 February 2003
Faced with fierce global competition from heavily subsidised farmers in Europe and elsewhere, Maluti Fruit Co- operative, one of South Africa’s largest new apple growers, says the South African government should assist the apple industry.
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/ 11 February 2003
Platinum mining will create employment for the foreseeable future and gold mining appears to have stemmed the haemorrhaging of jobs of the past six years, figures from Department of Minerals and Energy suggest. This in a week when platinum touched a high of $698 an ounce.
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/ 8 February 2003
The future of the Afrikaner was assured because he was starting to integrate with a larger, inclusive Afrikaans-speaking community in which race was playing a lesser role or none.
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/ 7 February 2003
South African Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana on Friday warned farmers and their representative bodies to stop threatening to retrench agricultural workers as a way to get the government to change agricultural legislation.
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/ 6 February 2003
Organised agriculture in the Free State and Northern Cape farmers said on Thursday that massive retrenchment of farmworkers could be expected over the next six months.
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/ 31 January 2003
South African Agriculture Minister Thoko Didiza’s comments that administrative errors had occurred during Zimbabwe’s land reform process has been described as "jeopardising" land reform in South Africa.
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/ 26 January 2003
The death toll in the Sizzlers gay massage parlour massacre where eight men were murdered and two seriously injured earlier this week has risen to nine, say Cape Town police.
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/ 24 January 2003
Thousands of Lesotho households have been left without a regular income after the completion of the Mohale Dam and with it the first phase of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project.
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/ 21 January 2003
The black wildebeest, which evolved around a million years ago on the central plains of southern Africa, is now under threat due to cross-breeding with its ancestral species the blue wildebeest, scientists warn.
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/ 21 January 2003
HIV/Aids was expected to slash 12-million off South Africa’s population growth by 2015, the University of South Africa’s Bureau of Market Research (BMR) said on Monday.
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/ 16 January 2003
The Mpumalanga Parks Board denied on Wednesday afternoon that it would endanger the lives of eight lions at a predator sanctuary in the province by moving them to another location.