"Media reports on this matter are incorrect, misleading and sensational, and based on interpretation by the DA of the information provided in a parliamentary response. While certain media have since corrected the facts on this issue, Independent Newspapers continue to repeat misinformation," said the minister in a statement.

Certain media reports claimed that the minister had stayed for 25 nights at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Johannesburg at a cost of R190 333 and paid R69 984 for a chauffeur-driven car. It also said that the minister stayed at the Hyatt in Canada for 11 days attending a meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

The reports further said that the minister had spent almost an entire year in hotels for the period April 2009 to July 2011. The minister had apparently spent 56 nights in local accommodation at a cost of R1.4 million and 102 nights in international accommodation at a cost of R592 768 during more than a two-year period.

"As Government and the Department of Transport, we take our responsibility locally, on the continent and internationally very seriously. All public funds utilized for international and domestic accommodation are in accordance with prescribed rules.

"We, therefore, welcome the investigation by the Public Protector into this matter, and the opportunity to explain these false allegations so as to set the public record straight," he said.

Ndebele added that he respected the process of the Public Protector investigation and would do whatever necessary to cooperate with it.

"We also reserve the right to pursue legal action against the parties responsible for the defamatory and false allegations being published, including the newspapers concerned," the minister said.

International hotel accommodation accounts for expenditure emanating from officials’ visits abroad, including Presidential delegations, mandatory meetings of various international bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), International Maritime Organisation (IMO), World Roads Congress, SADC Ministers of Transport, African Union, Global Road Safety Council, International Committee of Ministers of Energy and Transport and United Nations Road Safety Council.

International visits also comprise the signing of bilateral agreements in air services, infrastructure development, capacity development and training as well as other international matters of mutual interest and cooperation.

Other international visits were in response to invitations from counterparts in various countries. Costs for international travel vary according to the fluctuation of exchange rates.

Source: BUA News
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“I did not want this for my children. I worked hard to keep them in school, but my work as a seamstress simply did not bring in enough income,” Khan’s mother, Sadiqa Bibi said.

Media reports point to a marked increase in child labor as a direct result of the bomb blasts in the country. One report highlighted the plight of an 11-year-old girl who now drives a three-wheel bicycle rickshaw, as her father can no longer do so.

“The acts of terrorism have taken a terrible toll on families. The government generally gives out compensation to the families of those killed, and the injured, but these sums soon run out,” said Nauman Ali, a doctor who volunteers with the charitable Edhi Foundation, and is planning to set up an NGO to help blast victims. “There is no such organization at present, and no data really exists on the fate of families who lost one or more wage-earners, or have members who are disabled permanently,” he told IRIN.

According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal, run by the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, there have been 37,765 fatalities as a result of terrorist violence in Pakistan since 2003. In 2011, there have been 996 deaths and 2,411 injuries in bomb blasts across the country.

Read more of the story here at the IRIN news service:
PAKISTAN: Children paying high price for blasts

“The warping was identified by SANRAL in October 2010, well before the media reports, and a task team of pavement and material experts have been attending to the matter. Any defects on the GFIP toll network will not result in an increase in toll tariffs,” Minister Sibusiso Ndebele said in a statement.

He was reacting to reports that claimed motorists could end up paying for the repairs on top of the already confirmed toll fees for the province.

The warping affects some 12km of the N1 between Beyers Naude and Malibongwe off-ramps.

Ndebele’s office said the warping had occurred in relatively small areas, considering that approximately 1.7 million tons of asphalt was manufactured to surface some 13.5 million square meters of roadway.

“The contractual arrangements make provision for a defects liability period, and any defects, of whatever nature, that manifest are repaired by the contractor. We want to assure South Africans that government will not accept any sub-standard construction on any of our roads. As the Department of Transport, we will ensure that the highest standards are always maintained,” it said.

Ndebele said an investigation was underway, adding that the responsible party will be made to pay for the repairs.

Source: BUA News

African News from NetNewsPublisher.com

The pledge was made at the weekend when a Guinean interior ministry delegation held talks with Liberian officials, during which they delivered a special message from the Guinean authorities.

According to media reports, the “Security Alert Information Sharing Meeting” was held in the northern provincial capital of Voinjama in Lofa County. Guinea was represented at the meeting convened to deal with security threats by Mr. Kankan Mory Camara and Zeze Sekou Koivogui of the Guinea internal affairs ministry.

During the meeting, the Guinean delegates underscored the need for the Liberian authorities to adhere to their solemn oath that their country would not be used for subversive acts against the people of Guinea, and reaffirmed their commitment to working with Liberia and not to allow their borders to be used to destabilize Liberia.

A Liberian official, George Tengbe reaffirmed Liberia’s commitment to working with Guinea to maintain peace in the Mano River sub-region.

Guinea is virtually experiencing a power vacuum, with the evacuation last week of the vice head of state General Sekouba Konate from Guinea to seek treatment abroad, and the health condition of head of state Captain Moussa Dadis Camara still unknown.

Source African Press Agency

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Media reports in Monrovia on Monday quoted the NAO deputy national officer at the Planning Ministry, Alvin Attah, as saying that the money will go towards improving the infrastructure and health sectors of the post-war country.

Attah disclosed that the NAO had been formally notified by the Commission that the first payment of the budget support to Liberia would be disbursed within the first quarter of 2010.

He is further quoted as saying that part of the assistance would go towards reconstructing the 200km Monrovia-Ganta-Guinea highway and the 90 mile Monrovia-Buchanan highway.

According to Attah, €40 million of the grant will go to the Health ministry for the strengthening of the health care delivery system.

Source African Press Agency

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Media reports Wednesday quote Maritime Commissioner Binyan Kessely as saying that Liberia lost the seat owing to the civil crisis which started in 1989 that ended in 2003.

Binyan said as a category ’A’ member, Liberia will have voting rights on the Council, and that and that the country’s image within the global maritime industry would be restored.

Liberia which enjoys more than 60 years of challenging and successful history as a major player in the maritime world, currently boasts of being the second largest maritime nation in the world, with 3,000 vessels at its disposal.

Source African Press Agency

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The Director of the Bureau of National Fisheries at the ministry, Yevewuo Subah, attributed the alarming rate of illegal fishing activities to the lack of a functional coast guard, with the Liberian Coast Guard unit not being resuscitated since the end of the war.

Media reports on Thursday quote Mr. Subah as saying that Liberia is as a result now relying heavily on imported fish for domestic consumption.

He however said modalities are being worked out to revamp the country’s fishing industry and increase fish supply to the local market.

Source African Press Agency

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The TIME Web site may have just provided an excellent case study of what can happen when editors are pushed out of the loop. Since this involves one of their own staff writers at the Washington desk (Mark Thompson), my guess is that the problem can be attributed to the demands of Internet speed, which may leave some nostalgic for the days when Time was a weekly magazine whose publication cycle tended to provide more than ample time for both reflection and editing. Now that they are in partnership with CNN, those days are long gone.

The lesson of the case study can be seen in the opening paragraphs of an article that just appeared on the Web site:

Unlike the chattering classes, senior military officers didn’t raise an eyebrow when General Stanley McChrystal recently said he had only spoken once to President Obama since assuming command in Afghanistan. The military chain of command is there for a reason, and Obama seems to be sticking to it more faithfully than President George W. Bush did. But tensions are inevitable as the troop needs of U.S. commanders on the ground come up against the reservations of a political leadership increasingly leery of being trapped in an Afghan quagmire.

Some have argued that McChrystal violated military protocol by giving a speech in London last week emphasizing the need for more forces in Afghanistan at a time when that issue is the subject of hot debate inside the Administration. Obama, who convenes two key strategy meetings on Afghanistan this week, held an unusual meeting with McChrystal last Friday. (There was no dressing down, contrary to the suggestion in some media reports.) (See TIME’s photo-essay “A Photographer’s Personal Journey Through War.”)

?But in remarks widely reported as directed at McChrystal, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday, “In this process, it is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations — civilians and military alike — provide our best advice to the President candidly but privately.” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell insisted, however, that Gates’ message was meant for all privy to the Administration’s Afghan policy deliberations, and “is not a rebuke of Stan McChrystal.”

The military chain of command is a strange beast, rarely understood by civilians. But it’s sacrosanct inside the military, which is why President Bush caused heartburn among many in uniform when he began regularly communicating directly with Army General David Petraeus, directly with Army General David Petraeus (who the New York Times reported was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer in February while serving as chief of U.S. Central Command), then leading the surge of nearly 30,000 additional U.S. troops in Iraq. That represented a short-circuiting of the chain that ought to have passed through Gates and Admiral William Fallon, then chief of Central Command, and raised concerns that Bush was ignoring a military hierarchy critical to the smooth functioning of the civilian-military relationship and of the military itself. (Read “Congress Tackles Afghanistan Strategy.”)

Jones on Sunday appeared to criticize McChrystal’s London talk, in which the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan had warned that setting more limited war aims there would yield a “Chaos-istan.” The National Security Adviser emphasized that the Administration would prefer that its internal debates be kept internal. “Ideally, it’s better for military advice to come up through the chain of command” and remain private, Jones said, instead of being voiced publicly as McChrystal did last Thursday before the International Institute of Strategic Studies.

Jones? Are we supposed to know who he is? Actually, he is National Security Advisor James L. Jones; and, considering the extent to which this is an article about the chain of command and how it might be strained, it would seem that, at the very least, he should have been identified by his position on the organization chart, if not his full name. Granted, I feel a bit defensive about this guy, since I gave him a Chutzpah of the Week award on July 1, basically for his brilliant rhetorical move in telling the commanders on the ground in Afghanistan that any request for more troops would “quite likely” give President Barack Obama “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment!”

As I see it, there are two explanations for Jones’ name suffering from an “unresolved reference.” The more likely is that this is nothing more than sloppy editing, and it is the one I would like to believe. The more paranoid explanation is that this is an indication that Jones’ real position in the chain of command (that is in the day-to-day practices of who says what to whom) is no longer consistent with his position on the organization chart. This happens in business all the time. Academics like Ikujiro Nonaka have extolled it as a key attribute of a “hyperlinked organization,” implying that any business should be as richly connected as any good Web site. Of course not all hyperlinked Web sites are good ones, and there have been a variety of studies concerned with when links inform and then they confound. Because the informative value of hyperlinking is so poorly understood, we can appreciate why the Department of Defense does not want to be such a hyperlinked organization. Unfortunately, even if the only explicit links are the ones that define a strictly linear chain, we shall never get away from implicit links working their way into any operational setting. If those implicit links are gradually squeezing Jones out of his defined place in the chain of command, then Thompson’s text may have inadvertently tipped us off that a reorganization is in the works. Thus, a little bit of deconstruction may reveal a more significant subtext behind that sloppy editing!

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

Net News Publisher for World News

As the global economic crisis and political instability has cut visitors to Thailand, wild monkeys, mostly macaques, are attacking villages and even Buddhist monasteries across the country, pilfering everything that they consider edible.

“They are used to eating human food and understand well the difference between water, Coca-Cola and beer,” said a resident of the central Nakhon Pathom province’s Sam Phran district, where a recent monkey attack took place.

“They like all that food, but there are fewer tourists this year… and monkeys attack people’s houses in order to get food. We cannot explain the difference between us, locals, and tourists,” Thong told Thai PBS TV channel.

According to him, some 20 monkeys recently attacked several houses in the village, less than 100 km (60 miles) from Thailand’s capital Bangkok. The man said the monkeys only needed a few minutes to take all the food, including Coca-Cola and beer cans, from cupboards and fridges, destroying the furniture.

Thong said local residents had been forced to fortify their houses to keep out the hungry animals.

“We feel sorry for them. It is hunger that made them come here. That is why we neither shoot at them nor beat them,” he said, adding that provincial veterinary services had been asked to deal with the problem.

In August, hungry animals attacked a Buddhist monastery in the country’s Nakhon Sawan province some 200 km (120 miles) from Bangkok, ransacking the monastery kitchen, destroying furniture and part of the temple’s roof, media reports said.

Thailand’s monkeys are a big hit with tourists, who often give them food. Once a year, residents give the monkeys a traditional Chinese dinner, consisting of 12 meals, that is usually only laid on for the most important guests.

According to the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the number of tourists in the country has reduced by 20-25% in 2008-2009. The world economic crisis and the seizure of the international airport in Bangkok by the opposition People’s Alliance for Democracy in November 2008 are believed to be the main causes of the recession in the country’s tourism sector.

Source RIA Novosti

Net News Publisher

RFE/RL correspondent Abubakar Siddique spoke to Latif Afridi, a leader of the protesting lawyers and president of the Peshawar High Court Bar Association, about the protest movement.

RFE/RL: What are your major demands? What do you want to achieve from this protest?

Latif Afridi: Our main demands are simple. We want an independent judiciary in our country and we want the reinstatement of the judges whom [President] Musharraf deposed by force [from the barrel] of a gun last year as they refused to take an oath of loyalty to a military dictator.

RFE/RL: After winning the February 18 elections, the leaders of Pakistan’s new coalition promised to reinstate the deposed judges, but so far they have failed to honor their commitment. Why?

Afridi: The new democratic government twice agreed to a deadline to reinstate the judges. First they agreed to a 30-day deadline [April 30] and then to a 12-day deadline [May 12], but nothing happened. Then they said that they will reinstate the judges through a constitutional amendment in the parliament, but none of their commitments ever materialized.

This forced us to hold [lawyers] conventions throughout the country. The series of protests developed into the current “Long March” and hundreds of thousands of people are now participating in it.

RFE/RL: There were some media reports indicating that when in the capital, Islamabad, the lawyers plan to hold a sit-in until the deposed judges are reinstated. Are such reports true? What are your plans?

Afridi: When we reach Islamabad, our leadership will hold a consultation to decide for how long we should stay in Islamabad. We cannot stay in Islamabad for very long. But once we register our protest to the world and the Pakistani people then will decide what future steps we will take.

RFE/RL: Do you think that the current coalition government is afraid of your protests and have they tried to stop or undermine your movement?

Afridi: So far the government has not created any hurdles in our march towards Islamabad. In Islamabad, too, we have not heard about any hurdles. We plan to keep our protest absolutely peaceful and in a couple of days [after reaching Islamabad] we will decide which direction our protests should take.

RFE/RL: What you said earlier indicates that your main objective is just the reinstatement of the deposed judges. But in the past, some leaders of the lawyers’ movement have maintained that their real objective is to ensure an independent judiciary and the reinstatement of the deposed judges is not the real issue. How do you react to such assertions?

Afridi: The reinstatement of the deposed judges will be the cornerstone of a new, independent judiciary. We would then like to build an independent and efficient judiciary from the lower courts to the level of high court and Supreme Court so that it can deliver speedy justice to our impoverished masses.

RFE/RL: Don’t you think your protest will pave they way for future protests where everybody will try to come to Islamabad and force the government to accede to their demands?

Afridi: We think that the people of Pakistan need such protests. They need to understand and set a precedent that shows that people can stand up for their fair demands and make their rulers accountable.

Source Radio Free Europe

Copyright (c) 2008. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC
20036.

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