Doctors in Zimbabwe have hiked their fees by a staggering 100%, putting them well out of the reach of many, the state radio station reported on Wednesday. It will now cost around three million Zimbabwean dollars () to visit a general practitioner, the report said. Most Zimbabweans earn less than five million Zimbabwean dollars a month and some teachers earn only three million.
A total of 63 journalists and five of their assistants were killed carrying out their work last year, the highest number for a decade. Iraq remains the most dangerous country for media workers, with 29 journalists and assistants killed there in 2005, according to the annual report on press freedom published on Wednesday by the Paris-based organisation, Reporters sans Frontières.
The inquest into the cause of death of deceased national cricket captain Hansie Cronje is scheduled to be heard in Cape Town in a couple of months. Cronje died when the Hawker-Siddeley aircraft he was travelling in crashed into a cliff close to George airport nearly four years ago.
An African Union report condemning Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s human rights record has been hailed by South Africa’s official opposition Democratic Alliance. The report of the African Union’s Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights — meeting in Banjul, The Gambia — has urged Mugabe to allow an AU delegation to go on a fact-finding mission to his country.
Security chaos in the Gaza Strip escalated further on Wednesday when gunmen loyal to the ruling Fatah faction barred access to the border with Egypt and tried to kidnap the parents of an American peace activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer three years ago.
Rock legend Pete Townshend, getting ready to go back on the road with The Who later this year, is warning MP3 enthusiasts that listening to rock music through earphones could make them deaf. ”I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal components deaf,” the 60-year-old guitarist said in a diary entry on his website.
Police confirmed a total of five people were dead and 11 injured after renewed clashes between South Africans and foreigners on Wednesday at the Olievenhoutbosch informal settlement, south of Pretoria. Three deaths occurred on Wednesday and two people died on Monday, bringing the total to five.
Thirty people were killed and 36 wounded on Wednesday when a suicide bomber attacked a Shi’ite Muslim funeral procession north-east of the Iraqi capital, police said. More than 100 mourners were standing in a cemetery for the burial of a nephew of the director of the Muqdadiyah hospital when the explosion went off. Meanwhile, a car bomb in southern Baghdad killed at least seven on Wednesday.
The death toll from hunger and related illness in drought-hit northeastern Kenya has risen to at least 40 as more malnourished children perish, hospital and aid officials said on Wednesday, amid new appeals for urgent help to avert a major famine in the region.
Only one of the 13 United States coal miners trapped for 41 hours underground has survived, the company which owns the mine said on Wednesday, hours after it was announced that 12 men had survived. ”The initial report … proved to be a miscommunication,” International Coal Group president and chief executive Ben Hatfield told reporters.