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/ 27 September 2005
Fires that have killed two people and ravaged large areas of land have largely been contained, but now the provinces are starting to count the costs. Crews from the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Gauteng, Free State, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo have been fighting fires since September 23.
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/ 23 September 2005
The typhoid outbreak in Delmas, Mpumalanga, was caused by human waste in one of the boreholes, government biologists said on Friday. Vusi Kubheka, a bacteria specialist, said Salmonella typhi, the bacteria that causes typhoid, was found in a borehole in the area. ”Salmonella typhoid is carried in human waste,” he said.
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/ 20 September 2005
Eviction raids on two buildings in Hillbrow on Tuesday were merely punishing the poorest of the poor and not addressing their need for housing, a member of the Wits Law School said. Stuart Wilson from the university’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies said people living in ”bad” buildings had a constitutional right to have their housing needs addressed by the state.
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/ 8 September 2005
Dozens of bleary-eyed immigrants were marched out of their bedrooms by the police early on Thursday morning in a raid on what was once an upmarket hotel in Hillbrow. The raid came a day after officers from Booysens police station were shown on a television programme taking bribes to free illegal immigrants.
Two dinosaur embryos discovered in the Free State in the 1970s have been identified as the world’s oldest ”rotten eggs”. Dr Michael Raath, a palaeontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, said the two embryos are the oldest known embryos for any terrestrial vertebrate from anywhere in the world.
A Pretoria man claimed on Wednesday he is the world’s real champion blood donor and that a Guinness record of 350 pints set in Johannesburg on Tuesday is not genuine. Lionel Lewis (72) provided a South African National Blood Service document showing he has donated 368 pints.
Guinness World Record blood donor Maurice Creswick drank his 350th free cup of tea in Johannesburg on Tuesday after breaking his own record for the 14th time. Creswick (79) donated his first pint of blood at the old Johannesburg General hospital when he was 18 years old.
South Africa has made a good start in its preparation to host the 2010 Soccer World Cup, a Fifa spokesperson said on Friday. Marcus Ziegler was part of a delegation from the world football governing body who visited eight of South Africa’s 13 cities bidding to host games in 2010.
The world’s wealthiest nations are not wrong in being concerned about corrupt African leaders, Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Mathaai said in Johannesburg on Tuesday. Mathaai was the guest speaker at the annual Nelson Mandela Lecture, with an audience that included Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former United States president Bill Clinton.
Leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) nations slammed the door in Africa’s face in Gleneagles last week, just as the continent thought it was on the verge of a breakthrough in new aid and fair trade, ActionAid said on Thursday.