Armed only with shovels and plastic buckets, a few dozen volunteers struggled on Thursday to scrape oil-stained sand off a Beirut beach as environmental groups began the monumental task of cleaning up tonnes of oil spilt across Lebanon’s coast. ”This is the biggest environmental disaster in the Mediterranean basin, we can say that very easily,” said environmental group Green Line.
South African aviation security does not fully conform to international security standards. This much is admitted by the Civil Aviation Authority, whose website notes that a national aviation safety plan, effective since 2004, is not compliant with the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s standards.
There is no evidence of any organised group of any sort being the agent of an act of sabotage at Koeberg — which led to the shutdown of the nuclear plant earlier this year — South Africa’s Minister of Public Enterprises Alec Erwin told Parliament on Thursday. Erwin was speaking after months of controversy over remarks he made the day before the local government elections on March 1.
Emergency workers in south-west Ethiopia scrambled on Thursday to rescue thousands marooned by the latest in a series of deadly flash floods across the nation feared to have killed nearly 900 people. With 876 people in southern, eastern and northern Ethiopia already reported dead or missing, officials warned that the toll was likely to climb higher.
A typhoon churned toward Japan’s Pacific coast on Thursday with heavy rain and choppy waves, leaving three people, including a middle-aged surfer, dead or missing, officials said. Typhoon Wukong, which means Monkey King in Chinese, was moving slowly towards the southern main island of Kyushu, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
The case of convicted paedophile and serial murderer Sipho Dube was postponed on Thursday because his lawyer, Jesse Penton, had to attend to his ailing mother. Johannesburg High Court prosecutor Joanie Spies told the court that Penton’s mother was gravely ill in hospital and asked the matter to be postponed to next Tuesday.
Women police and metro officers handed a memorandum to Gauteng provincial minister of security Firoz Cachalia at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg on Thursday, pledging their support in the fight against crime. The event was part of Women’s Month celebrations.
The United Nations is investigating a suspected child prostitution ring involving its peacekeepers and government soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the UN mission said on Thursday. Among accusations being investigated is that pimps are using the presence of UN peacekeepers to lure vulnerable girls to go and work as prostitutes.
South African Breweries (SAB) has again warned consumers about an e-mail scan that is being widely circulated in South Africa and which promises free products from the company. SAB initially put a warning out to the public on July 20 and the e-mail has once again appeared in the public domain, SAB said in a statement on Thursday.
The economic collapse of South Africa’s neighbouring state, Zimbabwe, is stripping South Africa of economic growth of about 2% per year, yet South African President Thabo Mbeki has "handed over the baton" to others to resolve the political impasse in that country, Zimbabwe opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) policy adviser Eddie Cross said on Thursday.