Almost 600 miners of the 3 200 trapped underground have been rescued from Harmony Gold’s Elandsrand mine on Thursday morning. The cause of the accident was in dispute, the National Union of Mineworkers attributing it to a rock fall, the company saying a pipe carrying chilled water down the shaft, to cool air underground, broke and damaged equipment.
What shameful times we live in, buffeted by spin and lies. When the events of the past two weeks are recorded in history, will they appear as the turning point? When a president failed to rise above his personal ambitions, yank the skeletons from his party’s closet and secure democracy and its constitutionally protected institutions?
Rescue teams working to save 3 200 miners trapped deep underground in Harmony Gold’s Elandsrand mine brought 1 700 to the surface on Thursday morning, mine and union officials said. Harmony said the rescue operation was going smoothly and that a secondary lift was bringing up batches of miners.
The Mo Ibrahim Foundation was launched in October 2006 to promote good governance in Africa with the support of world leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Alpha Konaré, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. On October 22 2007, the foundation will announce the winner of the world’s biggest prize, the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, to be awarded to a former African executive head of state.
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The Premier Soccer League (PSL) should involve players’ unions in their deliberations on commission for television and sponsorship, the South African Football Players’ Union said on Wednesday. The PSL has come under fire this week over claims that it intends paying internal negotiators 10% commissions on a R1,6-billion television rights deal and a R500-million sponsorship deal.
Zimbabwe set out Wednesday to demonstrate that Western economic sanctions were hurting ordinary people, the poor and even the unborn. In its first detailed policy statement on sanctions, the central bank disputed claims from Britain and the United States that their ”targeted sanctions” — like travel bans on top officials — did not hurt most Zimbabweans.
Protesting students stormed into lecture theatres at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg on Wednesday, disrupting classes and chasing away lecturers. ”We have called police back to campus in a bid to have order restored,” management spokesperson Shirona Patel said.
South African police said on Wednesday they believed a serial killer was responsible for the deaths of eight women whose bodies were found dumped in sugar-cane fields on the KwaZulu-Natal. A police spokesperson for the Umzinto area said that while a forensics expert had not yet made his findings public, the most recent discovery of three bodies suggested a serial killer was at work.
The Scorpions crime unit is in the political spotlight again amid reports it was preparing to arrest the nation’s police commissioner, the latest high-profile official targeted by the elite force. Unease over the unit has been building within the ruling African National Congress since President Thabo Mbeki announced the formation of the FBI-style crime unit in 1999.