The Department of Public Enterprises and state arms company Denel on Monday dismissed as speculation media reports about a board reshuffle. According to Business Report, rumours are rife that Denel chief executive Victor Moche and human resource director Eugene Martin have been suspended or dismissed or have resigned.
The Pan African Parliament (PAP) recommended on Monday the creation of a bank for storing samples of the continent’s plant resources. This should be done ”with a view to preserving plant species and reconstituting the vegetation cover in the event of major ecological disasters”, says a PAP recommendation.
Up to 200 workers are believed trapped in the rubble of an eight-storey factory that collapsed in Bangladesh on Monday. Fifteen people have been confirmed killed, officials said. The concrete building, packed with night-shift workers, caved in soon after midnight when a boiler exploded, said a police spokesperson.
The safety of miners engaged in an underground strike since Friday is more important than labour grievances, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said on Monday. ”They [mine management] might be 120 times wrong but we must focus on the health and safety of the miners now to avert a crisis,” said Cosatu.
Allegations about the competence of a trainee pilot who died in an aircraft crash at the weekend were part of the inquiry into the matter, the South African Air Force (SAAF) said on Monday. SAAF spokesperson Captain Ronald Maseko was reacting to a newspaper report asking who would accept responsibility for the pupil pilot’s death on Saturday during a solo navigation training flight.
President Robert Mugabe’s government is to compensate hundreds of white farmers whose land was seized under Zimbabwe’s land-reform programme, a state-run newspaper said on Monday. ”Government has completed fixing compensation for 822 farms compulsorily acquired,” The Herald said.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on Monday called for -billion in immediate aid to help southern Sudan recover from Africa’s longest civil war. ”In the south, we will run out of food for two million people in a matter of weeks,” Annan told delegates from 60 countries at a donors’ meeting in Oslo.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Monday started its pleadings before the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’s highest court, against Uganda, which it accuses of invading DRC territory and massacring Congolese civilians. The DRC’s ambassador to The Netherlands outlined the position of the DRC in the proceeding.
Bursting with national pride, Ethiopians this week celebrate the long-awaited return home of the famed Axum obelisk, a huge third-century BC funeral stela plundered by fascist Italy nearly 70 years ago. After decades of wrangling, the first of three pieces of the 160-tonne granite monument will arrive in Addis Ababa from Rome on Wednesday.
Prices commanded by some of South Africa’s top wines at the 2005 Nederburg auction, which took place in Paarl on April 9, have skyrocketed by 90%, boosted by a more restricted, higher quality offering, with the average price per nine-litre case of wine rising to an all-time high of R2Â 145 from R843,36 in 2004.