The Chamber of Mines signed an agreement on Thursday with three unions over wages in the coal-mining sector. The chamber’s negotiator in the coal sector, Eric Nwedo, said the agreement would increase wages of higher-paid workers by between 7,5% and 8,5%. Lower-paid employees would get a 10% increase.
The Independent Democrats (ID) won another round in the floor-crossing battle on Thursday when the Cape High Court refused to overturn the expulsion from the party of Cape Town city councillor Achmat Williams. Deputy Judge President Jeanette Traverso also rejected Williams’s bid to delay his appeal hearing against the expulsion.
Despite persistent incredulous questioning by opposition parties, President Thabo Mbeki insisted on Thursday that the Zimbabwean government, the two factions of the Movement for Democratic Change and representatives of civil society are engaged in talks that will produce conditions for holding free and fair elections next March in an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity.
Claims of huge bribes, fevered meetings between leaders of political parties, angry letters to newspapers: yes, it’s floor-crossing season once more.
In a global effort to save amphibians from a deadly disease, zookeepers around the world want to turn 2008 into the ”Year of the Frog”. As many as 2 000 of the world’s 6 000 known amphibian species are in danger of extinction due to the spread of a parasite fungus called chytrid, which causes frogs to suffocate.
A diamond-encrusted skull art work by British contemporary artist Damien Hirst has been sold for £50-million (about R718-million) to an investment group, a spokesperson for the White Cube art gallery in London said on Thursday. The platinum skull, cast from an 18th-century European man, is coated in 8 601 diamonds.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s medical records, obtained unlawfully from the Cape Town Medi-Clinic, must be returned to the institution ”forthwith”, the Johannesburg High Court ordered on Thursday. Delivering the order in the case between the minister and the Sunday Times, the judge also said that all the minister’s medical records on journalists’ laptops be deleted.
The state-owned Mozambican Petroleum Company on Thursday unveiled a -million biofuels project aimed at easing an energy crunch in the fast-growing Southern African nation. A senior official said it will lead to a maximum annual production of 226-million litres of ethanol and biodiesel seven years after start-up.
A Western Cape headmaster, charged with three counts of indecently assaulting young girls, was found not guilty in the Parow Sexual Offences Court on Thursday. Christiaan Abrahams (56), principal of The Hague Primary School in Delft on the Cape Flats, was also acquitted on three charges of possession of child pornography.
A 16-year-old girl is being questioned by German police after the corpse of her newborn baby was found in a washing machine. She told police in eastern Germany the baby was still-born and she hid the body in a laundry basket, Schering said. The body had been put through the laundry cycle along with bed sheets.