While the government of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is taking steps to protect women from domestic violence, its security forces are raining down baton blows on women activists, one female victim said this week. Grace Kwinjeh was one of four women in a group of opposition supporters who were badly beaten by Zimbabwean police on March 11.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has accused South African mining companies of putting profit ahead of the lives of ordinary workers. Speaking to the Mail & Guardian this week after the deaths of two mineworkers at AngloGold Ashanti’s Moab Khotsong mine near Orkney, NUM general secretary Frans Baleni blamed the increasing number of mining deaths on the company’s management.
President Thabo Mbeki is not about to intervene in the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and her deputy, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge — despite their clash over conditions at the Mount Frere Hospital in the Eastern Cape.
This week union federation Cosatu declared a dispute with government, setting the stage for a second public service strike in the Western Cape less than three weeks after the end of the biggest civil servant strike since 1994. Cosatu’s provincial secretary, Tony Ehrenreich, said a second strike in the province ”seems unavoidable”.
His job might just be the most difficult in the land: fixing South Africa’s notorious department of correctional services. But Vernie Petersen, the newly appointed national commissioner, is ready for the challenge, and a new drum is already beating through this controversial and much-criticised department.
Cellphone masts do not cause harmful short-term health effects, according to a study of people who say they experience symptoms when they are close to them. The study dealt another blow to the notion that low-level electromagnetic fields from cellphones or base stations are dangerous.
South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) CEO Dali Mpofu this week asked his top 20 managers to sign letters consenting to undergo polygraph tests in an effort to determine the source of the leaked internal audit report the Mail & Guardian was interdicted from publishing last week.
Kliptown in Johannesburg erupted recently — and poor service delivery was at the root of the disturbance. Following similar explosions in Deneysville and Metsimaholo in the Free State, Lenasia South, Eldorado Park and the Khutsong area, poor communities have taken to the streets to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with government’s perceived inability to minister to South Africa’s poor.
United States troops are increasingly disillusioned at the continuing ability of insurgents to strike at them — and the longer tours of duty being imposed by Washington, Guardian photographer Sean Smith’s latest film from Iraq reveals.
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