Government’s bid to speedily provide affordable broadband services which could be drawn into a possible legal battle suggests its conceptualisation may have been bungled from the start. At the root of the legal mess is Public Enterprise minister Alec Erwin’s decision to from a state owned broadband company, Infraco.
A 94-year-old Australian great-great-grandmother has become the oldest person in the world to earn a master’s degree, local media reported on Thursday. Phyliss Turner, described by one of her sons as having "an amazing brain," took her master’s in medical science at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.
The death toll from floods in Bangladesh rose to 65 on Friday as relief workers struggled to reach millions of people stranded in their villages without food or clean water, officials said. Twenty-three of the country’s 64 districts in the north, centre and east were at least partly submerged by the flooding caused by snow melt and heavy monsoon downpours.
A train crash in a remote part of Democratic Republic of Congo killed at least 100 people and injured more than 200, the Central African country’s minister of information said on Thursday. Injured survivors initially walked or were transported by bicycle from the scene of the wreck 12km to the nearest hospital.
With just more than a month to go to the beginning of the World Cup, the superstitious among the 30-man squad chosen by the South African selectors will be avoiding black cats, ladders, people whose eyebrows meet in the middle and the other bad omens too numerous to mention.
Federal transport investigators began work on Thursday to establish the cause of the catastrophic collapse of the Mississippi bridge that had been classified as ”structurally deficient” two years ago . The police put the official death toll at four but predicted that would rise, confirming that rescuers had seen other bodies trapped in submerged cars.
In the first salvo of what promises to be an intense battle for the control of the powerful ANC national executive committee (NEC), Cosatu in KwaZulu-Natal has proposed the exclusion of President Thabo Mbeki and government ministers presumed to be loyal to him when a new NEC is elected in December.
Two major fuel refineries producing 380 000 barrels a day have been shut down as the chemical industry strike entered its fifth day on Friday. Meanwhile, the mining industry is bracing itself for a massive strike after unions this week declared a dispute with the Chamber of Mines.
MTN could face a multimillion-rand fine if the Competition Tribunal agrees with Cell C and the Competition Commission that it has been involved in anti-competitive conduct. This follows the Competition Commission’s decision to refer Cell C’s complaint to the Competition Tribunal for adjudication after it found that MTN was engaging in "price discrimination".
I had intended to go up to the north of Côte d’Ivoire. I still have fond memories of the two years I spent teaching English in a secondary school in Korhogo, the regional capital. I was enchanted by the contrast between my experience as an Abidjanaise and life in the northern region, writes Véronique Tadjo.