Africa is threatening to become the world’s newest drug nightmare as Colombian narcotics barons scheme to turn the continent into a hub for shipping cocaine to Europe, the head of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said on Tuesday. DEA administrator Karen Tandy said officials are also very worried about Africa’s new role as a weigh-station for heroin.
President Thabo Mbeki should personally intervene in the Merafong municipality demarcation issue, religious leaders in Khutsong said on Wednesday. ”We ministers of religion want to see peace restored and we plead with the president … to personally intervene …,” they told reporters in Carletonville.
An inquiry is under way in Mozambique to determine whether ”death brigades” existed within the national police that carried out summary executions of prisoners, according to a report by the Attorney General. One of the ”death brigades” is suspected to have slain three prisoners on a field near Costa do Sol beach in Maputo last month.
More than 100 United States lawmakers sent China’s President Hu Jintao a letter on Wednesday warning of ”disaster” for the 2008 Olympic Games if Beijing fails to do more to stop carnage in Chinese ally Sudan’s Darfur region. The United Nations says around 200Â 000 people have died and more than two million have been made homeless since conflict flared in Darfur in 2003.
Motorists issued with traffic fines because the country’s new electronic national traffic information system (eNaTIS) was offline may have them cancelled, Transport Minister Jeff Radebe said on Tuesday. Radebe apologised ”unreservedly” for the inconvenience the implementation of eNaTIS had caused.
Workers at Lear Corporation — a vehicle components firm in Pretoria — will strike after 300 union members were retrenched, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) said on Wednesday. Numsa said the retrenchments went ahead though the union had agreed to exempt the company from a proposed 5% wage increase.
Nurses at Zimbabwe’s major government hospitals are not reporting for work because they cannot afford transport costs due to low wages, the country’s health minister said. David Parirenyatwa told the official Herald newspaper that many nurses at state-run hospitals were suffering.
Eskom has been granted a licence to build the country’s first coal-fired power station in over 20 years, the National Energy Regulator of South Africa announced on Monday. The station, to be called Medupi, is located in Lephalale in Limpopo and consists of six units with a 4Â 500 megawatt capacity.
A Pakistani investigator on Tuesday said that a probe into the cause of death of national cricket coach Bob Woolmer was still inconclusive. Woolmer (58) was found dead in his Jamaican hotel room on March 18, the day after Pakistan crashed out of the World Cup by losing to minnows Ireland.
Ministers meeting on solutions to cuts in carbon emissions do not trust each other to come up with concrete measures by Friday. ”Many industrialised countries believe that the developing countries are unwilling and that they are doing too little,” said former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.