Staff Reporter

Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday shrugged off the threat of a United States attack and said accusations that Tehran was arming insurgents in Iraq represented an attempt to find a scapegoat for US "defeats and failures". The British government, however, backed Washington’s claims of covert Iranian arms supplies to insurgents.

Ségolène Royal on Monday received the nicknames of "Maman Ségo" and "Big mother" for her raft of promises to ease France’s social injustices and nurture the nation as she would her own children. But the Socialist candidate prompted right-wing criticisms that she had not spelled out how she would fund her promised bountiful state aid to the vulnerable.

Despite Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s welcome lighter tax load on property stamp duty and transfer duty implemented since 2002, further relief is needed as house prices continue to rise in South Africa. Easing the tax burden of purchasing a home is a necessity given that house prices are about 15% higher than this time last year.

Non-compliance with tax laws is not always driven by an intention to evade tax, yet the harshness of the penalties can cripple a small business while not addressing the root cause of non-observance. A senior tax associate at Webber Wentzel Bowens says that sometimes the cause of tax non-compliance is simply ignorance.

A Zimbabwean court will this week hear an application by Equatorial Guinea to have the jailed British mastermind behind an alleged coup plot there three years ago extradited, his lawyer said on Monday. Simon Mann has been in jail in Zimbabwe since 2004 after being convicted of trying to buy weapons as part of a bid to topple veteran President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

Envoys from the United Nations and the African Union arrived in Khartoum on Monday in a bid to revive peace talks in the troubled western Sudanese region of Darfur. Jan Eliasson of the UN and Salim Ahmed Salim of the AU are due to meet officials in Khartoum before heading to Darfur in a bid to win over rebel groups that did not sign a May 2006 peace deal.

If you type "Paul Harris" into Google, you’ll get results for a London fashion label, the South African cricketer, a Rotary fellowship, a basketball player and a magician. You’ll also get a couple of results that refer to Harris, one of the three friends who founded the FirstRand group and the company’s current chief executive.

From Maseru to Gabon, China’s footprint in our continent is getting larger. Jean Jacques Cornish quizzed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad on China’s growing presence and power in Africa as China’s President Hu Jintao completed his fifth continental tour this week.

When one reads a tabloid, you do so suspending credulity because, after all, its core business is "sex, scandal and skinder". It has to be different with a publication like the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>, founded in the cauldron of the struggle and espousing fundamentally different values, writes Ebrahim Rasool.

<i>The Media</i> magazine has appointed professor Nixon Kariithi, head of media studies at Wits University, and award-winning radio journalist and broadcast journalism lecturer Gilbert Mokwatedi of the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), to its editorial board.

The Competition Tribunal unconditionally approved the merger between Primedia and Kaya FM on Monday morning. This comes after months of hearings into Primedia’s battle for a 24.9 percent stake in the Gauteng radio station.

A divided Germany will know on Monday whether a former Red Army Faction terrorist is to be granted freedom after 24 years behind bars — ending weeks of speculation over the fate of Brigitte Mohnhaupt (57), who is serving five life sentences plus 15 years for her involvement in several murders.

Vladimir Putin delivered the strongest attack of his seven-year Russian presidency on the United States on Saturday, blaming it for fanning conflicts across the world through the unilateral use of "hyper-force". He said the US is seeking to impose its standards on other nations and triggering new arms races.

Rival Palestinian factions meeting for crisis talks in Saudi Arabia on Thursday night agreed to form a coalition government, but there was no immediate guarantee that it would be enough to lift an international boycott on the Palestinian government. After two days of talks in Mecca, the leaders of Hamas and Fatah agreed a list of ministers for a new national unity Cabinet.

The Western Cape town of Paarl is the centre of South Africa’s tiny, but fast-growing, alpaca industry. In five years, about 1 000 of these woolly natives have been imported from South America. "It’s a growing industry, so the start-up and initial costs are high and the returns are slow, but it’s very good to get into," says Udo Mettendorf, who imports and breeds alpacas.

First National Bank’s aborted intervention was ill-thought out and foolish, both politically and in business terms, writes Steven Friedman. "FNB risked sending a signal that it is prepared to pioneer a new form of business social involvement on an issue which worries its senior executives, but not those which concern many of its workers or account-holders."

"If we don’t deal with these allegations in an open and truthful manner, they will come back to haunt us for years and years." These were my words to ANC secretary general Kgalema Motlanthe in mid-2001 after giving him information I had in relation to the controversial arms deal, writes Andrew Feinstein.

A few years ago, the opposition in South Africa released another of what had been a string of attacks on the failings of the state. The Auditor General had just made his report public, and its contents — a fairly damning catalogue of misspent or misappropriated funds — provided a convoy-load of ammunition to the shrill finger-pointers.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Thursday vowed that the it would hit back at United States interests worldwide if attacked, amid mounting tension with the West over its nuclear programme. "They should not intimidate Iranian people with these things," Khamenei said, referring to speculation Washington is planning a strike on Iran to halt its atomic drive.