Gauteng education minister Angie Motshekga is ending her department’s contract with JCJ bus operators. ”I had enough of bus operators who hold us hostage and negotiate with us in bad faith,” said Motshekga in a statement. JCJ has indicated it intends withdrawing more than 40 buses, ”thus rendering 18 of Gauteng department of education schools ineffective”.
Cholera in Angola has spread to a 15th province as the death toll reached 2 089 and the number of cases exceeded 50 000, the World Health Organisation said on Monday. The deadly but easily treatable water-borne disease broke out in Luanda’s northern slum of Boa Vista and rapidly spread throughout the seaside capital.
Pretoria police officers arrested three men and seized a police identity document, a firearm with the serial number filed off, counterfeit money and drugs early on Tuesday. They made the find after searching a car they had followed from Colbyn to a service station in Church Street, said Inspector Katlego Mogale.
Using snuff or chewing tobacco is associated with an increased likelihood of developing cataracts, Indian researchers report. Dr Prema Raju of the Vision Research Foundation and colleagues evaluated tobacco use among 3 924 adults from rural areas. In all, 1 705 used tobacco in various forms.
A high profile New Zealand lawyer has taken to wearing women’s clothing to court to protest the old boys’ network he accuses of dominating the country’s justice system. "I will now as a lawyer be wearing women’s clothing. The deeper the cover-up, the prettier the frocks," Dr Rob Moodie said in a report in the <i>Dominion Post</i> newspaper on Tuesday.
Fish rained down on the Indian village of Manna last week, startling locals who hailed the phenomenon as a miracle. In an echo of the Bible’s manna from heaven, fish up to 55mm long plummeted to earth for 15 minutes in the remote village in the southern state of Kerala.
The remains of actor James Doohan, who played the starship Enterprise‘s chief engineer ”Scotty” on Star Trek, will be blasted into space in October, the company organising the flight said on Monday. On the programme, when Captain James Kirk ventured off the spaceship Enterprise and faced peril, he would demand Scotty ”beam” him back up to the safety of the ship.
The world’s largest auction houses have seen sales surge in the first half of the year, boosted by record prices for rare paintings and increased interest from buyers in emerging markets like China and Russia. Privately-held Christie’s said on Monday it earned a record £1,2-billion (,1-billion) in worldwide sales in the first six months of the year.
The collapse of the Doha round of trade talks on Monday is just one more pressure point on financial markets already bruised by interest rate uncertainty, fear of economic retrenchment and escalating geopolitical tension. It robs investors who believe in the wealth creating properties of globalisation of the prospect of yet more openness, replacing it instead with worries about growing protectionism.
A British parliamentary committee has concluded that English football’s governing body should abolish rules that prevent girls playing in mixed teams with boys after the age of 11, The Guardian said on Tuesday. The current restrictions were imposed in 1921 because the Football Association deemed the game ”unsuitable for females”.