Up to 200 people died on Friday when an oil pipeline blew up at a beach village near the Nigerian economic capital, Lagos, a police officer at the scene said. An Agence France-Presse correspondent at the scene reported seeing scores of carbonised, disfigured corpses floating on the water.
A strike by security guards from the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) will continue, the union warned on Friday. ”Satawu is not prepared to call off the strike. We are prepared to suspend the strike if the employers return to the negotiating table,” Satawu general secretary Randall Howard told a press briefing.
Rafael Nadal clinched his 50th successive victory on clay in Rome on Thursday with a 6-2, 6-2 win over Britain’s Tim Henman to reach the Rome Masters quarterfinals as he closed in on Guillermo Vilas’s all-time record on the surface. If Nadal successfully defends his title on Sunday, he will equal the record set by Argentine Vilas who managed 53 straight wins on clay in 1977.
In 1824 an English bricklayer named Joseph Aspdin rediscovered one of the great secrets of the ancient world. Burning limestone and clay together at an incredible heat — more than 1 482°C — made the two minerals fuse together. Once cooled and ground into a fine ash, the resulting substance would, after mixing with water, set as hard as the Portland stone that gave it its name.
A 280kg man had to be removed from his home by a crane because he could no longer leave the apartment through the door, an official said on Friday. In an operation that took three hours to complete and involved 12 firefighters, the man was taken out of his apartment through a window and transported by a van to Strasbourg’s University Hospital for treatment.
Tropical storm Chanchu slammed into the Philippines overnight, causing flash floods and landslides that forced the evacuation of hundreds of villagers, disaster-relief officials said on Friday. The storm, the first to hit the Philippines this year, left more than 6 000 people stranded.
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Evidence in court should not be seen as a policy statement, particularly on Aids, the African National Congress and its alliance partners said on Friday in welcoming Jacob Zuma’s acquittal on a rape charge. The media and other commentators should not ”proceed from a position of ignorance”, said the ANC’s weekly online newsletter.
Former Drum journalist Can Themba commented that there were names that did not lend themselves to the prefix ”mister”. Among them he included his own and that of Jesus Christ. This came to my mind when I learned that Patrick Pule ”Ace” Ntsoelengoe, one of South Africa’s greatest footballers, had been found dead in his car.
Hundreds of women dressed in blue and white church uniforms, green and black African National Congress Women’s League gear and new yellow Women’s League T-shirts had just finished singing songs honouring Thabo Mbeki. ”50/50 re a rata / Hela Basadi / Thabo Mbeki re mo ratile [We love the ANC’s 50% gender balance / We women / We love Thabo Mbeki],” they sang.
Under our Constitution, poor people have enhanced opportunities to use the powerful language and institutions of human rights law to protect and advance their interests. But how have they fared thus far? The Constitutional Court has established the foundations of its jurisprudence on socio-economic rights in a series of landmark cases.