Distraught relatives protested and demanded answers on Sunday, two days after a collapsed dike in eastern China flooded two coal mines, leaving 181 workers missing and feared dead. State media said the breach in the dike had been closed, but gave no indication if there were any signs of life.
Zimbabwe’s main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said on Saturday it will ”enlighten” regional leaders who have dismissed the country’s crises as exaggerated at a Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit that ended in Lusaka, Zambia, on Friday.
Nine people died in a collision between a minibus taxi and a bakkie on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast late on Saturday afternoon, police and paramedics said. Initial reports from the accident scene indicated that the driver of the north-bound bakkie had lost control after a tyre apparently burst.
The war between the Sunday Times and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang continued in this weekend’s edition of the newspaper. It alleged that she had required her liver transplant this year because she was an alcoholic, and that she had been convicted of theft while working in Botswana in 1976.
A sense of frustration is creeping into various groupings within the tripartite alliance and the business community, which want businessman Cyril Ramaphosa to enter the succession race for the leadership of the ANC and the country. Sections of the business community worry that the former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers might be running out of time because he has not yet indicated an interest in running for the ANC’s top job.
The facts remain confused, the allegations wild and numerous, but one can’t help feeling that Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is being grossly misrepresented in the media. Firstly there is the issue of her alleged threat to "fix" fired deputy Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge and, in this case, no thinking South African can harbour any doubts about Tshabalala-Msimang’s innocence.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Saturday she does not know who her new deputy will be. She was touring Durban’s Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital to see what improvements had taken place at the hospital’s maternity and neonatal wards where a klebsiella outbreak claimed the lives of 22 babies in 2005.
Heavy rains continued to wreak havoc in East and Central Africa on Saturday as floods that have already displaced hundreds of thousands heightened fears of food shortages and disease outbreaks across the region. In Uganda, high waters submerged entire villages and destroyed many farms in the east of the country.
A Turkish plane heading for Istanbul from northern Cyprus was hijacked on Saturday, but the hijackers gave themselves up and released all hostages five hours after forcing the plane to land in Turkey. CEO of Atlas Jet airline Tuncay Doganer confirmed that the hijack of the passenger plane had come to an end.
An enraged man in a western Ugandan district took a machete and hacked to death his wife and six children before hanging himself, the government press reported on Saturday. Abdallah Byekwaso cut his children aged two to 13 beyond recognition and beheaded one of his sons.