The South African Trade and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) on Friday accused Fidelity Springbok Security Services of discriminating against its members. Spokesperson Ronnie Mamba said in a statement on Friday that Fidelity ”continues to target Satawu members for abuse, intimidation and victimisation”.
Ukrainian Yaroslav Popovych of the Discovery Channel team won the 12th stage of the Tour de France on Friday to deprive the hosts of a coveted victory on Bastille Day. American Floyd Landis retained the race leader’s yellow jersey ahead of Saturday’s 13th stage, at 230km the longest of the race, between Beziers and Montelimar.
Gauteng’s school-bus transport saga is over, the provincial education department said on Friday. Education provincial minister Angie Motshekga said that misunderstandings about the payment of bus operators had been handled at an urgent meeting in the morning.
Somalia’s transitional president on Friday ruled out talks with Islamists in control of the capital, claiming they had broken an earlier agreement and planned to seize more territory. The two sides had been due to meet in Sudan on Saturday for a second round of talks aimed at resolving differences.
The United Nations Security Council convened an emergency meeting on Lebanon in New York on Friday, with Beirut demanding support for an immediate end to the daily Israeli air strikes on its territory. The debate began just hours after Israeli forces bombarded the command headquarters of Hezbollah in Beirut.
Ralph Ginzburg, a scandalous editor and publisher of Eros, the magazine ”of sexual candour”, who was convicted in the 1960s for sending it through the mail, has died of cancer, media reports said on Friday. Ginzburg died on Thursday at the age of 76 in New York.
The documentary on South African President Thabo Mbeki, recently rejected by the state broadcaster, the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), sounds like ”something of a left-wing hatchet job”, official opposition communications spokesperson Dene Smuts said on Friday.
Wage negotiations between the National Petroleum Employers’ Association (NPEA) and the trade union Solidarity have deadlocked, NPEA spokesperson Alfie Ngubo said in a statement. ”Although the NPEA made a settlement offer of a 6,5% wage increase on basic wages, … they were unfortunately not able to resolve the dispute,” he said.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has painted a gloomy picture of the war-battered country’s health sector, press reports said on Friday, with the country now having just 34 doctors, or just one per 80 000 people. In the late 1980s, there were 400 doctors, she was quoted as telling a just-concluded meeting of aid donors.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Friday rebuffed calls to declare a state of emergency to stop the country’s economic freefall as it ”would send the wrong signals”. Instead, the cash-strapped country will ”soldier on” and pursue its policy of finding financial partners in Asia, rather than depend on Western aid, Mugabe told the state-owned Herald newspaper.