Cresslawn in Kempton Park was still without power on Wednesday but the municipality said it would restore electricity to the area by late afternoon or early evening. The entire East Rand suburb was plunged into darkness last Tuesday after a fire at a local substation.
One of the three mine workers injured during a ground fall at Driefontein mine on Tuesday has died, bringing the death toll from recent mining accidents on the West Rand to five, a Gold Fields spokesperson said on Wednesday. Andrew Davidson said the worker had been taken to a hospital in Carletonville to be stabilised, and was then transferred to the Krugersdorp Hospital, but later died.
A special unit of Burundi’s police arbitrarily detained and tortured civilians last year, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) group said in a report released on Wednesday. In a 42-page report entitled Every Morning They Beat Me: Police Abuses in Burundi, HRW documented 21 cases of beatings and torture carried out in October 2007.
Georgia on Wednesday slammed Russia’s plans to boost peacekeeping troops in two rebel Georgian regions as the start of "full-scale military aggression". "It’s hard to believe that this is being done for the purposes of peacekeeping; it’s rather the beginning of full-scale military aggression," Georgian Foreign Minister David Bakradze said.
India’s largest hospital and pharmacy chain, Apollo Hospitals Enterprise, is planning to set up hospitals in African countries, chairperson Prathap Reddy said on Wednesday. Apollo plans to take its total hospital bed count to 10 000 from 8 000 now over 18 months.
Harsh living conditions in Kenya are making it difficult for HIV-positive people displaced in the recent election violence to stay healthy.
Wales players are set to be exposed to a week of training at a cryotherapy centre ahead of the Six Nations Grand Slam winners’ two Test tour of South Africa in June, coach Warren Gatland announced on Tuesday. Cryotherapy is a process in which the body is briefly subjected to extremely low temperatures below -110°C.
North Korea again runs the risk of outright famine, ten years after up to one million of its people died of starvation, a leading United States research institute said on Wednesday. ”The country is in its most precarious situation since the end of the famine a decade ago,” said Peterson Institute senior fellow Marcus Noland.
Australia’s Brumbies will not to be sidetracked by history or the widely acclaimed Stormers injuries in the run-up to Saturday’s make-or-break Super 14 clash at Newlands. The history books will show that the last time the Brumbies lost at Newlands was in 1998, and apart from one draw in 2006, they’ve always defeated the Stormers in the Mother City in a decade of clashes.
South African petrol pump prices and wholesale diesel prices will rise sharply next week, the government said on Wednesday, adding to inflationary pressures. The Department of Minerals and Energy Affairs said all grades of petrol would on May 7 rise by 55 cents, or 6,2%, to R9,46 a litre in Gauteng.