Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse hundreds of striking municipal workers who went on the rampage in the Johannesburg city centre on Thursday. Police action came as the strikers advanced on the Johannesburg Civic Centre in a march authorities said was illegal.
The 19 current and former African National Congress MPs in the Travelgate case are to ask the national director of public prosecutions to drop the charges against them, their lawyer said on Thursday. He told Cape Town magistrate Hennie le Roux that plea-bargain negotiations with the Scorpions have reached a dead end.
At least 245 people have died in landslides and building collapses in western India following the heaviest rains recorded to date in the country, a government minister and police said on Thursday. Meanwhile, 351 workers were rescued from a blazing Indian offshore oil platform but at least 10 people died, a minister said on Thursday.
British police interrogated their first captured London bombing suspect, arrested nine more men and poured officers into London underground stations on Thursday as chilling details emerged of a large-scale terrorist battle plan.
While the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other entities welcomed Telkom’s announcement to reduce tariffs as a "good sign", they said that the fixed-line monopoly’s proposed tariffs remain high by international standards.
Trade union Solidarity on Thursday said in a statement that the remuneration of steel producer Highveld Steel’s directors had increased by between 50% and 200% in the previous financial year. The trade union said that at the same time, the company was offering its workers a wage increase of only 5%.
The JSE Securities Exchange (JSE) continued its rally into uncharted territory on Thursday fuelled by stronger world markets and continued demand for equities. It was the 16th day since July 5 that the all-share index broke new ground. At 12.03pm, the all-share index was up 0,49% at 15 194,09.
A telephone card bearing an image of deposed Iraq leader Saddam Hussein was pulled off the Brazilian market by Telefonica after São Paulo prosecutors threatened the telephone company. The card, featuring a Hussein in the custody of soldiers, was issued by the company in June as part of its ”World History” series.
A chemical contained in soya damages human sperm while on their journey through the fallopian tubes to fertilise an egg and could thus affect a woman’s ability to conceive, a British academic has found. The chemical genistein causes sperm to lose their acrosomes, the caps that allow them to penetrate the egg.
Vienna’s Leopold Museum has invited the public to come in the nude on Friday to view an exhibition of erotic works by Austrian masters such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, a spokesperson said on Wednesday. The exhibition is titled <i>The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals</i>.