Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi has scolded his nation for over-reliance on oil, foreigners and imports and told it to start manufacturing things people need. The criticisms, in an unusual series of speeches in July and August, have stirred keen interest in a forthcoming annual September 1 address to the nation of five-million.
Increased productivity could lift South Africans out of the abyss of the many social ills they face, Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana said in Johannesburg on Monday. The government is aware of the challenges in uplifting people’s lives, he told a conference on promoting productivity in Africa.
South Africa could face ”a grave constitutional crisis” that could leave judges considering whether they should ”continue on the bench”, the Durban High Court said on Monday. Judge Chris Nicholson was referring to a government statement that it would not to comply with a court order to expedite anti-retroviral treatment at Durban’s Westville prison.
Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi appealed on Monday for foreign aid to train security forces to help his weak government face growing threats from the country’s powerful Islamist movement. Gedi warned of continued instability in the lawless Horn of Africa nation without outside assistance to secure his administration.
At least three Egyptians died Monday when two buildings collapsed in separate incidents, police said, adding that several people were still trapped under the rubble. A three-storey building in the province of Qaliubiya, north of Cairo, collapsed overnight, killing three people and injuring three, a police official said.
A suspected suicide bomber killed at least 17 people and wounded almost 50 in a crowded bazaar in southern Afghanistan on Monday, the latest attack in a surge of violence in the Taliban heartland. Several children were among those killed or hurt in the blast in Lashkar Gah, capital of the country’s prime drug-growing province of Helmand.
At least 18 people were killed in northern Kenya during cross-border cattle raids by about 300 armed bandits from Ethiopia, officials said on Monday. Most of the dead were raiders who tried to steal thousands of animals from several villages close to the Ethiopian border, 650km from the capital, Nairobi, they added.
The JSE was treading water just before midday on Monday, with the overall index just marginally weaker after a scrappy morning’s trade that lacked any real direction. The bank holiday in the United Kingdom made for extremely light volumes — not even a billion rand worth of shares had changed hands.
At least 150 bodies have been recovered since last week following flash floods caused by heavy monsoon rains in India’s desert state of Rajasthan, officials said on Monday. The toll has risen sharply since Sunday as rescue workers continue to find more bodies as flood waters fell in the normally drought-prone area.
Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army on Monday ordered its forces to prepare for an imminent truce with the government under which they will move to neutral camps in southern Sudan. In recorded government-authorised messages broadcast over radio stations in war-ravaged northern Uganda, LRA commanders called on their fighters to come out of the bush.