Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo launched a major blood bank and transfusion project on Thursday, donating blood at a new centre that hopes to begin cleaning up the Aids-contaminated blood supply in Africa’s most-populous nation. The centre is spearheaded by a United States charity called Safe Blood for Africa.
Journalists and broadcasting workers at the British Broadcasting Corporation will strike for three days starting later this month over plans to cut 3 780 jobs across the organisation, union officials said on Thursday. Workers from three trade unions will walk out on May 23, May 31 and June 1.
The seizure of the assets of alleged brothel keeper Andrew Phillips was not for any ”legitimate purpose”, but to punish him even before his trial was over, the Constitutional Court heard on Thursday. Those assets were placed under a preservation order in February 2000 and a restraint order in December that year.
The Eastern Cape health department vowed on Thursday to prosecute officials responsible for letting clinics in the East London area run out of chronic medicines. ”We view this as gross negligence,” a departmental spokesperson said. ”We are going to charge people. There are people that are going to face the music.”
The Cabinet has welcomed the progress made in finalising the deal between Britain’s Barclays and South Africa’s Absa. However, activist group Jubilee South Africa on Thursday urged the government to withdraw its approval of Barclays’ bid to buy a 60% stake in Absa, as the British bank supported the apartheid government.
Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) beneficiaries are to have their grants paid directly into their bank accounts in future, in terms of an initiative launched by the fund and First National Bank on Thursday. ”This is the second phase of our struggle — to liberate people from queues,” UIF commissioner Shadrack Mkhonto said.
Author Tom Wolfe said on Wednesday his next book will look at off-the-wall behaviour — wealthy investor types who hide their status, dress like delinquents and act like bad seeds. The book will be non-fiction, ending a string of three novels and marking a return to the genre that made Wolfe famous as a founder of new journalism.
Firemen in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk fled a burning sauna in panic after mistaking a three-metre boa constrictor for a hosepipe, the Itar-Tass news agency reported on Thursday. The reptile called Yasha, kept as a mascot by the owner, had succumbed to smoke and lost consciousness on the floor.
It is one of Switzerland’s most picturesque ski resorts. But over the past two decades the Gurschen glacier above the village of Andermatt has been melting, forcing locals at the beginning of every ski season to build an artificial snow ramp. Now, however, the resort’s organisers have come up with a novel way of protecting their mountain from global warming — they have wrapped it in clingfilm.
At least 10 people were killed and more than 20 injured in a bomb attack on a market in a Shia district of Baghdad on Thursday. The blast followed the deaths of 71 people in a series of suicide bombings on Wednesday. Of the 135 car bombings last month, more than half were suicide missions.