South Africa

Pockets of protesters marched around Delmas’s Bontleng township on Wednesday venting their anger over a typhoid outbreak in the town that has claimed four lives. Rocks were thrown at a South African Press Association vehicle as well as a convoy carrying Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon.

The lesson to be learnt from the life of Holocaust survivor and indefatigable Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal is that ”justice does not have a sell-by date”, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) said on Wednesday. ”It has to be striven for unceasingly,” said Michael Bagraim, the national chairperson of the SAJBD.

Kaizer Chiefs on Tuesday night lost their appeal at a South African Football Association (Safa) hearing against the R145 000 fine and effective two-game ban on spectators attending two of their home games. Media reports on Wednesday said Chiefs are now considering an arbitration route.

Thousands of Zimbabwean television viewers are deserting that country’s ZTV and opting for foreign networks via satellite as uneconomic licence fees have crippled ZTV’s programming, Zimbabwe’s Herald Online reported on Wednesday. There is a roaring trade in decoders and satellites and their installation.

Marissa Naidoo, the 10-year-old child who was kidnapped and murdered last week in Benoni, will be buried in the town on Wednesday, South African Broadcasting Corporation radio news reports. Meanwhile, investigations have yielded no evidence that her killer worked with an accomplice, East Rand police said on Tuesday.

Both SA Rugby and the Springbok management on Tuesday dismissed newspaper reports that Blue Bulls scrumhalf Fourie du Preez sustained an injury during the recent Springboks’ fitness testing in Bloemfontein. The entire group of contracted Springboks attended the two-day medical evaluation and fitness testing.

It is time to bundle out capitalists seeking to steal the African National Congress away from the working class, Congress of South African Trade Unions General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said on Tuesday. ”Now is the time for workers to forcefully claim the ANC as their own,” he told the eighth National Congress of the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union.

The state-owned Cape Town Community Housing Company (CTCHC) has failed to deliver on its promise for quality, low-cost housing, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said on Tuesday. Leon said the City of Cape Town and the CTCHC have to deliver on their promises of quality housing.

Eviction raids on two buildings in Hillbrow on Tuesday were merely punishing the poorest of the poor and not addressing their need for housing, a member of the Wits Law School said. Stuart Wilson from the university’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies said people living in ”bad” buildings had a constitutional right to have their housing needs addressed by the state.

Residents at two Hillbrow buildings, where up to 25 people have been squatting in one room, tossed blankets and other possessions out of windows as the Red Ants moved in with eviction orders on Tuesday morning. Inspector Kriban Naidoo said the evictions were happening after an early-morning raid on the buildings.

Nine Johannesburg buildings, some of which were built in the art deco style of architecture in the 1930s and 1940s, have been earmarked for destruction. The buildings, which the South African Heritage Resources Agency says are all in good condition, once housed the Rand Water Board, Colonial Bank and Volkskas Bank.

A mechanic accused of slitting his wife’s throat claimed in the Pretoria High Court on Monday police had ”tortured” a confession out of him. Pieter Viljoen denied that he had anything to do with his wife Amelia’s gruesome murder in 2001 and attacked the admissibility of his statements about the murder.

A mother and her two children died in a fire in a house in Troyeville early on Tuesday morning, Johannesburg emergency services said. Spokesperson Malcolm Midgley said the father, suffering from serious smoke inhalation, was taken to a local hospital. The fire apparently started in a television room.