South African Nobel peace prize laureate Desmond Tutu said on Wednesday Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe needed face-saving options for there to be a chance of him stepping aside. Tutu said the replacement of Tony Blair by Gordon Brown as prime minister of Britain, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, could help the situation.
The opening match and final of the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa will take place at the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg. Fifa’s executive committee said on Wednesday the decision was made on Tuesday by the bureau of the World Cup Organising Committee.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi said on Wednesday his plan for a United States of Africa should include creating a two million-strong army to staunch recurrent conflicts that have ravaged many of the continent’s nations. Gaddafi was addressing hundreds of youths in Côte d’Ivoire’s economic capital, Abidjan.
Trade unions are expected to finalise their consultations on the future of the public-service strike on Thursday. The unions caucused on Wednesday night at the Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council in Centurion, south of Pretoria. Several unions attending that meeting said they were ready to suspend the strike.
Delegates to the African National Congress’s (ANC) policy conference were tight-lipped on Wednesday evening about the outcome of behind-closed-doors debate on the party’s strategy and tactics document. Earlier, party president Thabo Mbeki told delegates that the ANC had never sought to prescribe to the South African Communist Party the policies it should adopt.
Helicopters were launched on Thursday to airdrop urgent relief aid to some of the more than 400 000 people battered by monsoon-spawned flooding in coastal areas of Pakistan, officials said. Many of the stricken were living in higher open areas or atop the roofs of buildings to escape the floodwaters.
Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moloketi and Nehawu secretary general Fikile Majola offer a post mortem of the recent mass action. The Mail & Guardian‘s Matuma Letsoalo reports.
”Kapok or snow, it’s all the same for us, baba,” remarks Xolani Khwinana, a scruffy 18-year-old from Zamimpilo squatter camp, west of Johannesburg. Despite being situated under long electric power lines, the settlement has remained powerless for more than 10 years. There are only five communal water taps serving hundreds of families and about 30 communal lavatories.
South Africa’s platinum boom has given rise to mushrooming informal settlements by migrant labourers around mines, posing serious health, social and environmental risks to communities, a new report says. The world’s two biggest platinum producers, AngloPlat and Implats, have announced multibillion-rand expansion plans.
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