Notwithstanding the strong demand for private healthcare, Netcare’s operations in South Africa are operating in an extremely challenging environment, the hospital group said on Monday. This environment was due to ”increased regulatory and cost pressures”, it said.
Zimbabwe’s opposition accused the government’s military intelligence division on Monday of plotting to assassinate party leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who is due to contest an election run-off with President Robert Mugabe. Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Tsvangirai postponed his return to Zimbabwe on Saturday after his party said it had discovered a plot to assassinate him.
When night falls the devastated town of Yingxiu, at the epicentre of last Monday’s earthquake, becomes a vision of the apocalypse. At dusk the last army helicopter moves off through the haze and rescue workers start looking for firewood rather than bodies.
The expansion of the Super 14 rugby finals to a six-team play-off next year is all but a certainty after this season’s logjam saw two form teams miss the cut. Sanzar officials have been considering revamping the finals, with the most obvious first step being to increase the number of teams involved following repeated complaints that a four-team final is far too restrictive.
Egyptian police shot and wounded a Sudanese man to prevent him from crossing the border illegally to Israel from the Sinai peninsula on Monday, a security official said. The official, who asked not to be named, said police opened fire on the 24-year-old after he refused to comply with orders to stop.
Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin would retire after the elections next year, a media report said on Monday. ”The minister would like to confirm that he would not be serving another term. His decision was taken long before the change in African National Congress leadership,” said his spokesperson Vimla Maistry.
Barack Obama is planning to declare himself the effective winner of the long-running contest with Hillary Clinton at the close of the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on Tuesday. At that point, he should have passed one of the last remaining milestones in the race, securing more than half the 3 253 elected delegates.
While a frenzy was building amid the sea of fans massed to glimpse Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford and the rest of the stars at the world premiere on Sunday, a healthy scepticism was building up at the Cannes festival among film critics who would assess the merits of the movie on show.
The Johannesburg High Court on Monday set aside the suspension of South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) CEO Dali Mpofu. ”I rule that the meeting at which the decision was taken to suspend Mpofu was unlawful,” said Judge Moroa Tsoka.
Another foreigner has been killed in South Africa as a wave of xenophobic violence spreads across Johannesburg, bringing the weekend death toll to 13, police said on Monday. The violence against foreigners, who are accused by many South Africans of depriving locals of jobs and committing crime, has spread across townships since the beginning of last week.