Zimbabwe’s labour movement on Tuesday said it is finalising plans for nationwide protests to press for realistic wages, stoking up tensions in a country already on knife edge because of a deepening economic and political crisis. Zimbabwe’s economy is on a free fall, with inflation pegged at 1 193,5%.
The Israeli army entered southern Gaza on Wednesday after threatening a major offensive to try to secure the release of an Israeli soldier taken hostage by Palestinian militants. Tanks and soldiers began taking up positions in two locations east of the town of Rafah under the cover of tank shells.
The city of Cape Town is to institute claims against the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) for damage caused during the union’s protest march last month, a spokesperson said on Wednesday. Pieter Cronje said 248 people had reported personal injuries and damage to their property totalling R1,15-million.
An armed man was killed and a police reservist wounded in another shoot-out between police and men who allegedly held up two fast food outlets in Fordsburg, police said on Wednesday. This follows a shoot-out in Jeppestown on Sunday in which four police officers and eight susepcts were killed.
Despite what the do-gooders and nanny-state mentalists would have us believe, we’re not all the same. Some of us want bland cars that can carry a family of five with two weeks’ worth of luggage, and run on the sniff of an oil rag for 30 years without much in the way of servicing, while others will take performance over functionality every day of the week.
Margaret Beckett, Britain’s first female Foreign Secretary, revealed on Wednesday that she uttered a rather undiplomatic swear word when Prime Minister Tony Blair offered her the job last month. Pressed on whether the word began with "f" or "s", she admitted it was an "f".
South African Airways (SAA) on Wednesday launched a project to fight baggage pilferage and theft at Johannesburg International airport. From July 1, all baggage on SAA flights will be wrapped in plastic by an automatic machine, SAA’s chief risk officer, Vishnu Naicker, said.
We all get angry sometimes. Some of us, no doubt, are angry right now. Some of us are angry for wholly legitimate reasons to do with a computer that has been temporarily inhabited by evil spirits, and some of us are just being irrational. And some of us, it seems, have anger as a disease.
On April 30 the Boston Globe journalist Charlie Savage wrote an article whose contents become more astonishing the more one reads them. Over the past five years, Savage reported, President George W Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws that have been enacted by the United States Congress since he took office.
From a distance the object bobbing in the bay looked like a coconut or a buoy, but when it was washed up on the beach it proved to be a human head. ”It wasn’t pretty,” said Jose Vargas, who joined the crowd that had gathered. He was shocked but not surprised by the sight. ”This kind of thing happens in Acapulco these days.”