Malagasy authorities have destroyed 137 houses and expect to knock down more ahead of next month’s Indian Ocean Games, an official said on Tuesday. The structures were built illegally on land set aside for the August 9 to 19 competition, said Elyse Razafimahefa, a senior official in the capital, Antananarivo’s, city council.
Zimbabweans were reminded on Tuesday that there is only one certainty in their lives. Prices are running wild and there is nothing they can do about it. The latest bad news came from Mozambique, where an International Monetary Fund official projected the Southern African country’s year-on-year inflation could reach over 100Â 000% by year end.
The price of New York crude oil surged on Tuesday to the highest level for more than one year, supported by market expectations of falling United States energy stockpiles, dealers said. New York’s main futures contract, light sweet crude for delivery in September, touched ,47.
Afrikanerbond chairperson Pierre Theron has appealed to prominent black businessmen to start an upliftment fund for black South Africans, similar to that launched in the 1930s to benefit poverty-stricken Afrikaners. He said on Tuesday the fund launched by the Afrikanerbond’s predecessor, the Afrikaner Broederbond, raised R30-million over only six years.
Four automated teller machines (ATMs) were blown up in separate incidents around the country in the past week. However, the South African Banking Risk Information Centre is confident there has been a decline in such incidents recently, and that the downward trend will continue.
The Health Department is preparing to introduce dual therapy to improve prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The National Strategic Plan for HIV and Aids and Sexually Transmitted Infections allows for introducing dual therapy for reducing mother-to-child transmission, the department said in a statement on Tuesday.
Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula appears to be ”deliberately misinterpreting” legislation in order to avoid the government’s legal obligation to set up camps for refugees from Zimbabwe, the Democratic Alliance said on Tuesday. The minister had recently rejected a DA suggestion that refugee camps be put up.
Transnet Freight Rail, formerly Spoornet, will spend R34-billion over the next five years as part of its turnaround strategy, CEO Siyabonga Gama said on Tuesday. Speaking to reporters at a press conference in Johannesburg, Gama said the overall turnaround strategy entailed refurbishing and building new railway lines linking the country’s economic centres.
More than 1,2-million people in the central Chinese province of Hunan are facing a ”water crisis” after four weeks of drought and high temperatures, which are also straining power-generating capacity, state media said on Tuesday. Hunan has received 25% less rain than normal and about half of its two million water-storage facilities are half-empty.
The end of brutal wars in West Africa and global efforts to halt recruitment have cut the number of child soldiers, but experts say vulnerable children are still forced into battle from Latin American to Asia. Armed with Kalashnikovs and machetes, traumatised children were at the heart of wars in the 1990s in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.