By Obakeng Maje

The current spate of rape and abuse cases in our country is a matter of grave concern and a painful reminder of the disregard for human life and human dignity.

“We are confident that the law-enforcement agencies will do everything in their power to ensure that victims of these crimes get justice. Those found guilty of these heinous crimes must face the full wrath of our criminal justice system” Department of Children,Women and People with Disabilities said.

“We are on record as calling on our courts to impose the harshest possible punishment against those found guilty of crimes against women and children. We believe that those who derive pleasure of abusing women and children must rot in jail” Spokesperson Cornelious Monama said.

“We call on all our people to join our campaign to eliminate gender-based violence in our society. We must confront crimes against women with every available ammunition at our disposal to ensure that those who harm the most vulnerable in society have no place to hide” He said. 

Violence against women cannot be tolerated in our free and democratic society. It is a gross violation of the Constitutional rights of women. 

The Departmen say they have to acknowledge the fact that gender-based violence robs women of the opportunity to become productive citizens of the country.

 It denies them their constitutional rights and condemns them to a life of perpetual fear. 

They are therefore prevented from enjoying the fruits of our freedom and democracy. 

“This means that the task of making ours a truly non-sexist society is undermined” He adds.

 “We are also concerned at the growing reports of women who continue to die at the hands of their partners and children being killed or abused by people who were supposed to protect and love them” Department said. 

Many of these cases point to a deterioration of the moral fibre of our society. 

They urge members of the communities to join hands with government in order to help defeat the scourge of child and women abuse.

As the government and people of South Africa, they say we have taken the war against gender-based violence to a higher level.

 On the 10th of December, government launched the National Council Against Gender-Based Violence. Led by the Deputy President, we are confident that the work of the Council will lead to a significant reduction in the incidents of violence against women and children. 

The Council is a multi-sectoral structure capable of providing authoritative leadership as we collectively confront violence against women and children. 

The seriousness with which government views gender-based violence and its impact on individuals, communities and society has been the driving force behind the establishment of the National Council Against Gender-based Violence. 

“We urge all South Africans to join this fight” They said. 

“When we know that someone is being abused in our own home or in our neighbour’s house, we have a duty to report it” Department said.

Rustenburg – The government-appointed Commission of Inquiry into the dozens of deaths at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana will likely only present its final report in June, two officials said on Wednesday.

The commission, headed by Ian Farlam, a retired Supreme Court of Appeal judge, was meant to finish its work last month and present a final report by the end of January.

However, officials said the commission was intent on conducting more hearings and the next round of testimony would begin on January 21.

Dozens of people died in late 2012 after a wildcat strike at the Lonmin mine in North-West province turned violent, with clashes erupting between rival unions and later between strikers and police. The worst day of violence came on August 16, when police shot dead 34 miners.

Commission members “have asked for an extension. They say they can wrap up the hearings within three months. But we are giving them until May. When they finish in May they will have one month to file the final report, which means by the end of June,” Jacob Skosana, the head of policy at the Department of Justice, told dpa.

His comments were confirmed by another official close to the commission who requested anonymity as he was not authorized to speak with the press.

Skosana said the paper work was being prepared to make a formal application to the government to have the mandate of the commission extended.

A spokesman for President Jacob Zuma said his office had yet to receive an formal demand for an extension but would review such a request.

The commission has a wide-reaching mandate to investigate all aspects of the violence, including rivalries between unions, police conduct, Lonmin management and the manner in which the government dealt with the crisis. – Sapa-dpa

London – Honestly, with all the fuss you’re making of it, you’d have thought no one went to bed with anyone who wasn’t their wife before now,” grumbled an old friend of mine at the beginning of the sexual revolution in the 1960s.

He was referring to Philip Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis:

“Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) –

Between the end of the

‘Chatterley’ ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.”

And in a way my friend was right. Widespread and raging sexual intercourse began a long time before 1963.

But the 1960s were different. The Pill had arrived and women were liberated. It was thought that now women needed have no fear of becoming pregnant, they would want to have sex as much as men.

The only problem was that many of them couldn’t cope with this sudden transition. It was a confusing time for everyone. When they said to a reluctant woman: “Come on, you know you’re dying for it,” men really did imagine this was true. Sexual equality – and by that I mean equality in desire and behaviour – was almost imposed on women whether we liked it or not.

It took the women’s movement in the 1970s to free us from this imposed sexual freedom. And, oddly, the liberationists’ message was at once freeing and restraining. “No means No!” they proclaimed.

And although they meant the phrase as empowering for women, it was ironic that it was almost exactly the same one as used by the modest girls in the 1950s, who would push men away when they’d gone “too far”.

Despite this, people went on having sex like there was no tomorrow. Agony aunt columns were packed with enquiries like: “If I don’t have an orgasm will I get cancer?”, “Where is my G-spot?”, “Do women ejaculate and if they do, why don’t I?”

The next brake on the sexual revolution came, of course, from the outbreak of Aids in the 1980s. Doom-laden ads featuring mammoth gravestones warned us not to “die of ignorance”. Condoms were handed out like sweets, and meant sex wasn’t quite as fun as it used to be. If it didn’t stop the sexual revolution, it at least limited the spread of the one-night stand. Temporarily.

Because it soon turned out that we weren’t going to “die of ignorance”. So people went on bonking. And bonking. And by now, women’s liberation had meant that women were able to gets jobs, and become self-sufficient. They didn’t have to use sex as some kind of lever to find a husband, as they used to. They could look at sex now in a more dispassionate way. It was more up to them whether they had sex or not. And, perhaps, some did finally find they could look at sex in the same way as men.

And some men, too, freed of the ties that made them feel they were weird or different unless they said “Phwoarr!” every time a pair of boobs on stilts passed by, found that they could be a bit more relaxed about sex, too.

No question, these days most people have many more sexual partners than they did before 1963. So where are we?

As sex becomes more part of our normal lives than something special, and as we take it more for granted, isn’t it becoming less important?

Love and sex are no longer inextricably combined, as they used to be. The art of seduction, which took a lot of time and energy, has all but disappeared. There’s even a website called Friends With Benefits, which, if you want to have sex, allows you to log in and find someone in your area who’s also ready.

There are hardly any tut-tutting noises to be heard at all. True, there are mutterings about whether gays can marry in church. And there’s a wave of anti-paedophilia. But will these voices, too, eventually die down?

Could Philip Larkin have been right?

25 MILESTONES:

1 THE MINISKIRT, 1964: The miniskirt, which Mary Quant named after her favourite car, saw newfound freedom for legs and leg lovers. Although the French designer Courrèges was also slashing skirt lengths, Quant herself said, “It wasn’t me or Courrèges who invented the miniskirt – the girls in the street did it.”

2 THE SUMMER OF LOVE, 1967: 100 000 bare-breasted, barefoot flower children gathered in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to “make love not war”. But at a price. From 1964 until 1968, the rates of gonorrhea and syphilis in California rose 165 percent.

3 MIDNIGHT COWBOY, 1969: A film about a naive male prostitute (which starred Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman proved how out of touch the censors were when it became the first (and only) X-rated film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

4 EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK), 1969: Sex was out of the bedroom and into the spotlight as the popularity of Dr David Reuben’s sex manual proved. It became a bestseller in 52 countries and has been read by 150 million people. Woody Allen, who based a 1972 movie on the book and called sex “the most fun you can have without laughing”.

5 FIRST LESBIAN AND GAY PRIDE MARCH, 1970: The first Lesbian and Gay Pride march happened in New York. The first UK Pride march through London was held on July 1, 1972 with about 2 000 participants. By 2010, the event was attended by a million people.

6 FANNY HILL FINALLY PUBLISHED, 1970: Never mind Lady Chatterley’s Lover, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure (written 1749) was still considered too scandalous for publication in 1963. It wasn’t until 1970 that an unexpurgated version of the most frequently banned book in history was published.

7 THE FEMALE EUNUCH, 1970: Germaine Greer’s seminal text argued that women were separated from their sexuality by the trappings of femininity. She went on to encourage women to accept their bodies, taste their own menstrual blood and give up monogamy – “The c**t must come into its own.”

8 THE JOY OF SEX, 1972: The illustrated guide by Alex Comfort was banned in Ireland, removed from libraries in the US and went on to sell 10 million copies. The illustrations were based on photos of the artist Charles Raymond and his memorably “bushy-haired” wife.

9 PLAYBOY REACHES SEVEN MILLION, 1972: Founded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner with a $1 000 (about R8 500) loan from his mother, Playboy peaked at a circulation of more than seven million copies – a quarter of all American men were buying the magazine every month. It was also the first men’s mag to be printed in Braille.

10 LAST TANGO IN PARIS, 1972: A middle-aged Marlon Brando having sex with Maria Schneider in a bare Paris apartment was hailed as “the most powerfully erotic movie ever made”. Several countries banned it.

11 PLAYGIRL, 1973: The success of the first ever male centrefold – a nude Burt Reynolds lying on a bearskin rug in US Cosmopolitan – inspired Douglas Lambert to come up with a women’s version of Playboy.

12 MASTURBATION IN MILLS & BOON, 1973: It wasn’t until the 1970s that unmarried characters could have sex in Mills & Boon novels, but 1973 marks the first masturbation scene, at the, ahem, hands of lonely heroine Suzy Walker. The first oral sex scene came in 1982 in a book called Antigua Kiss. The heroine “surrendered to ecstasy”.

13 DEEP THROAT, 1972: Considered the first mainstream porn movie, it featured a plot (of sorts), relatively high production values and was screened in selected cinemas. Despite (and probably because of) numerous obscenity trials, it went on to become the most popular porn movie of all time, banking a reported $600m.

14 THE CHIPPENDALES, 1979: Founded in Los Angeles by Steve Banerjee as a Broadway-style show that would attract middle class women, the Chippendales and their polished pecs, bow-ties and shirt cuffs are now seen by two million people a year. But the story gets darker than their tans; in 1990, Banerjee hired a hitman to murder ex-Chippendales who were starting up a competitive show, and hanged himself in prison in 1994.

15 INTERNET PORN, 1991: Tim Berners-Lee’s worldwide web has revolutionised the way we communicate, shop and do business. It’s also the largest assemblage of bottoms in the history of the universe. A recent report estimated that 30 percent of all web traffic is for adult sites.

16 MADONNA, 1992: With the release of her coffee-table book Sex (arty shots of a leather-clad Madge straddling a dog) and her album Erotica, Madonna’s controversial message of female sexual empowerment defined her career. And she’s still flashing at 50. See also Christina Aguilera, Rihanna and Lady Gaga.

17 ONLINE DATING, 1995: Market leader Match.com launched back in 1995, and now millions of people around the world turn to dating websites hoping to find love at first byte.

18 VIAGRA, 1996: When volunteers testing a drug for high blood pressure reported a suspicious number of erections, pharmaceuticals company Pfizer realised something was up. Literally. Tens of millions of the little blue pills have now been prescribed.

19 THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, 1996: Drawing on intimate interviews with more than 200 women, Eve Ensler wrote a series of monologues to “celebrate the vagina”. It has now been performed in 140 countries by all manner of celebrities.

20 SEX AND THE CITY, 1998: HBO’s comedy about four single women in New York managed to be both funny and (mostly) realistic about sex, thereby spawning legions of fans, two terrible films and endless conversations about whether you were actually a Carrie, Samantha, Miranda or Charlotte.

21 RAMPANT RABBIT, 1998: Though vibrators have been buzzing since Victorian times, they went truly mainstream after Rabbit featured in an episode of Sex and the City.

22 BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, 2005: It took eight years for the film starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal to find funding and it was first released only to limited cinemas, but eventually “the gay cowboy movie” lassoed box-office gold and became one of the most honoured films in cinema history, despite missing out on a Best Picture Oscar.

23 SLUTWALK, 2011: Three thousand women took their “sluttiness” to the streets – marching in bras and panties – in protest after a Toronto police officer suggested that to remain safe, women should “avoid dressing like sluts”. The movement has divided feminists, some calling it “the pornification of protest”.

24 THE FIRST GAY SUPERHERO, 2012: Although there have been doubts about the sexuality of Batman and Robin for years, the first major comic book hero to come out of the cartoon closet was the Green Lantern. After 72 years, DC Comics said Hal Jordan would be reintroduced as a gay, prompting outrage from a Christian family group.

25 FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, 2012: Writer E L James brought BDSM (that’s bondage, dominance and sadomasochism, by the way) to the masses after her smash hit “mommy porn” sold more than 40 million copies around the world, mainly thanks to downloads by e-readers. Could it be the start of a new sexual revolution? Or is it just the same old submissive woman cliché, reworked and repackaged for the age of the Kindle? – The Independent

KwaZulu-Natal – Three teenagers died when they were struck by lightning in KwaChezu, Nkandla, northern KwaZulu-Natal, on Wednesday evening, authorities said.

“Two of them aged 13 and 14 and from the Dlamini family, and one from the Zwane family, died instantly when they were struck by lightning while returning from a local tuck-shop,” provincial co-operative governance department spokesman Lennox Mabaso said.

It brought to more than 10 the number of people killed by lightning in the province in the past few weeks.

MEC Nomusa Dube, who would visit the teenagers’ families soon, sent condolences to their families.

“These incidents are getting more severe and their frequency suggests that extreme and abnormal weather conditions caused by climate change have a lot to do with these tragedies,” she said. – Sapa

Mpumalanga – An elderly couple was found dead in their home in Belfast on Wednesday morning, Mpumalanga police said.

“Their bodies were found by the police this morning (Wednesday) stashed inside a deep freezer in their house with their hands and feet tied with cables,” spokesman Colonel Leonard Hlathi said.

Rudolf and Elna Van Heerden were both 79-years-old. They had been beaten over the head with a blunt object.

Two firearms were stolen from the house. Their Toyota Prado was found abandoned on the N4 near Middelburg.

No arrests had been made. – Sapa

The Siya crew can reveal that Mamelodi Sundowns midfielder Surprise Moriri could be heading to Ajax Cape Town.

It was revealed in today’s edition of Soccer-Laduma, issue 803, that the Downs are preparing a bid for Ajax’s Khama Billiat. The Urban Warriors have placed a price tag of R10 million on the Zimbabwean international and it is believed that Sundowns are prepared to offer hard cash and Clayton Daniels for the highly rated 22-year-old.

However, the latest news reaching the crew is that Moriri is expected to be offered to the Cape-based side as part of the deal that will see Billiat join the Chloorkop-based outfit.

The veteran has been used sparingly at the club this season and it seems that Sundowns are willing to see the player leave in order to secure their target.

Moriri’s experience will be a welcomed inclusion within the Urban Warriors camp, with the side struggling to find their form this season. As the team flirts with the relegation zone, the former Bafana Bafana man could be the player to bring stability to the team and help salvage their campaign.

Wits have also expressed an interest in Daniels, as reported in today’s edition of Soccer-Laduma, however Moriri and the Daniels could well be sporting the Ajax jersey before the close of the January transfer window.

 For more details go to http://www.soccerladuma.com

Black Leopards have announced Abel Makhubele as the team’s caretaker coach until the end of the season. Makhubele takes over the Lidoda Duvha coaching duties, following Ian Palmer’s exit.

Palmer, who recently accepted a coaching job at National First Division Santos, parted ways with Leopards after two months at the helm of the team.

“Black Leopards today announce that assistant coach Abel Makhubele has now been appointed as caretaker coach of the first team until the end of the current 2012-2013 season. 

“The club made this announcement via a brief statement released today, Wednesday 9 January 2013. Makhubele has now been at the club for two seasons, and has proved to be a diligent, knowledgeable coach, who has a great working relationship with technical director Sunday Chidzambwa. 

“He is familiar with the culture of the team and is great with the youngsters at the club,” Leopards confirmed on the club’s official website.

Makhubele is the third coach to take charge of the Limpopo-based outfit this season, following Chidzambwa and Palmer’s spells on the bench.

Bezuidenhout Valley, Johannesburg – A six-month-old baby was kidnapped and his nanny almost killed in Bezuidenhout Valley, Johannesburg police said on Wednesday.

Lt-Col Lungelo Dlamini said police were searching for a Pakistani couple who were renting a room in the house where the attack took place on Tuesday.

“It is alleged that the couple were tenants at a house in Bezuidenhout Valley and had not paid rent for December 2012.”

He said it was suspected they tried to kill the nanny by slitting her throat with a sharp object and taking the baby.

The nanny was found by the owner of the house in a critical condition before being taken to a local hospital.

“It is suspected that the couple with their three children are still in Gauteng. The woman is allegedly pregnant,” Dlamini said.

Police appealed to anyone with information of their whereabouts to come forward. – Sapa

By Obakeng Maje

Hartswater- Those who are accused of murdering Gaesiwe Motsae(22) who was killed after she allegedly ran away from initiation school in Hartswater appeared briefly before magistrate today.

Ellen Mogwera(30),N Molale(22),Keadimilwe Gopane(27),Keikantsemang Molale(19) and John Vis(18) were denied bail by Hartswater court today.

They were arrested after Motsae,22 was beaten to death at an initiation school last year in December.

Motsae allegedly ran away from the initiation school and was later taken back forcefully by the accused.

“On her arrival she was allegedly beaten to death with knobkieries and stones were hurlted at her while her lower body dipped in the ground” Leutinant Tawana said.

“All accused were denied bail and will appear back in court on the 23rd of January for bail appearances” He said.

The were unrest outside the court as residents were chanting and singing liberation songs.

The vehemently against the bail of all accused and held placards.

By Obakeng Maje

Delareyville-A bus driver who was accused of bribery and conduct corruption was granted bail of R1000 today along with his co-accused.

The two appeared at Delareyville Magistrate Court today after their arrest on sunday.

Wilson Mogwera,53 and Esau Mogole,22 were arrested on sunday after their buses were impounded by the Department od Safety. The buses were considered unroadworthy and 14 of them were removed from the roads.

“The two suspects were arrested after they tried to bribe one of our employees here in the department. Wilson Mogwera as an owner offered one of our employees a whopping R60 000 prior he release his buses” Simon Mmope said.

“He was set up and working in conjuction with the police, Mogwera was arrested. He paid our worker R7000 in cash and another R30 000 were recovered in their possession” Department of Safety spokesperson said.

They appeared before magistrate today and were granted a bail of R1000 each.

Their next court appearance will be on the 25th of February.