Editor : Joseph Vhudzijena

Johannesburg - The ANC Youth League (ANCYL) will start identifying what strategic sectors of South Africa should be nationalised, deputy president Ronald Lamola said on Monday. "The NEC (national executive committee)... has begun internal deliberations to take forward the resolution for strategic nationalisation and will be making submissions to the ANC," Lamola told reporters in Johannesburg. "The mineral wealth to be nationalised should be based on the economic importance of the mineral or sector concerned." This was a resolution taken at the ANCYL's national executive committee meeting on August 17 and 18. Lamola said the ANCYL would propose that Sasol [JSE:SOL], Kumba Iron Ore [JSE:KIO] and Arcelor Mittal [JSE:ACL] be among the companies to be nationalised. The league was looking for others to add to the list. "We are now scouting," he said. Minerals such as iron, platinum, vanadium, manganese and zinc should also be added to the list. Lamola said...

Like clergymen, scientists do not enjoy sharing their ignorance and failures with their audiences. In fact, up until Einstein wrote (in 1905) the three papers that would earn him the title “ man of the century ,” scientists were so sure they had figured out 98% of everything there is to figure out about the universe. For 300 years before Einstein, Newtonian physics was the unchallenged truth: there is matter (stuff) which is made of elements and compounds, then there is energy (gravity, magnetism, electricity, etc) which connects and steers matter, and of course there is a lot of void (vacuum or nothingness ). What was there not to understand? Well, a little before Einstein came to the scene, another scientist by the name of Max Planck was asking why metal, like iron, turned red when it was heated. Red is supposed to signify lesser energy than all the other colors in the electromagnetic spectrum. Then Einstein wrote the three papers that would explain Planck’s mystery and forever c...

The Marikana massacre has exposed an increasingly tense relationship between the ANC leadership and its fractious members in North West. It has also created ground for Mangaung battles. The strained relationship between the mineworkers, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and, by extension, the ANC, created a vacuum that expelled ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema sought to fill this week. Malema, suspended youth league secretary general Sindiso Magaqa and league spokesperson Floyd Shivambu have been in Marikana with the miners since Friday last week. They arranged legal representation for the 259 miners who were arrested and joined the workers in laying charges of murder against the police. But Malema denied that he was on a personal and anti-Zuma crusade, using the tragedy for his own political agenda. "I can't sit back while my people are being killed and pretend as if it is not happening," he said this week. "I have an obligation to intervene and r...

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - A Nepali man who was bitten by a cobra snake bit it back and killed the reptile in a tit-for-tat attack, a newspaper said on Thursday. Nepali daily Annapurna Post said Mohamed Salmo Miya chased the snake, which bit him in his rice paddy on Tuesday, caught it and bit it until it died. "I could have killed it with a stick but bit it with my teeth instead because I was angry," the 55-year-old Miya, who lives in a village some 200 km (125 miles) southeast of the Nepali capital of Kathmandu, was quoted by the daily as saying. The snake, called "goman" in Nepal, is also known as the Common Cobra. Police official Niraj Shahi said the man, who was being treated at a village health post and was not in danger of dying, would not be charged with killing the snake because the reptile was not among snake species listed as endangered in Nepal. (Reporting by Gopal Sharma, Editing by Elaine Lies and Michael Perry)

JOHANNESBURG — The recent deadly strikes at Lonmin's Marikana Platinum mine in South Africa revealed the country's "structural problems" which could damage investment, Fitch rating agency said on Friday. "The protests highlight broader structural problems that have long weighed on South Africa's rating," Fitch said in a statement. "These include policy uncertainty, particularly regarding the mining sector, and lack of progress on education and labour reforms which ... has resulted in insufficient growth to create the jobs required to put a dent in an unemployment rate of 25 percent." About 3,000 rock drill operators at Lonmin launched an illegal strike on August 10 that quickly devolved into clashes with non-strikers. Ten people including two police were killed, leading to the crackdown on August 16 when police gunned down 34 armed miners. The strikes would not immediately affect South Africa's rating, but long-term failure to fix the...