About 200 members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) who picketed at the Beit Bridge post near Musina on the border with Zimbabwe dispersed peacefully on Friday afternoon. ”The situation at the border was very tense and there was a strong police presence, but it was a peaceful demonstration,” said Cosatu’s Limpopo provincial secretary.
President Thabo Mbeki’s 12-car cavalcade has evoked the ire of official opposition leader Tony Leon. The Democratic Alliance leader said in his weekly internet column, South Africa Today, that the ”classic sign of an over-centralised government is the tendency of its leaders to spend lavishly on their own comfort”.
The trade union Solidarity said on Friday that it is undertaking a full investigation into accidents at Harmony Gold’s mining operations in the Free State, which it said have claimed 13 lives over the past six months. The union had what it called "incisive" talks with the principal inspector of mines for the Free State in Welkom earlier on Friday.
Rebels holding the north of Côte d’Ivoire say they are gearing up for an imminent return to hostilities in the divided and tense West African state following an attack last month on one of their positions. Humanitarian workers said, meanwhile, that a recent attack in the restive west has sent up to 15 000 people in the area fleeing.
The Gambia’s media is outraged by the promulgation of two new press laws it says were signed in secret by President Yahya Jammeh to muzzle freedom of expression as the country gears up for elections next year. Jammeh has approved the two laws, which were passed by Parliament in December, despite a storm of protest at home and abroad.
The Asian tsunami attracted more media attention in the first six weeks after it struck than the world’s top 10 ”forgotten” emergencies did over a whole year, according to a report from Reuters. Other emergencies — from the devastating wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan to HIV/Aids — have been neglected by world’s media.
Services in public hospitals across Burundi continued to be paralysed as an indefinite strike by nurses entered its fifth day on Friday. The nurses are demanding better pay and working conditions. Although nurses have been reporting for duty at most hospitals, they have not been working as normal.
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A French arms-company executive told the Durban High Court on Friday it is usual to have high-level political contacts when trying to sell arms abroad. The executive is the first representative of the company to testify in the Schabir Shaik fraud and corruption trial.
The African National Congress will review the progress the country has made ”in the pursuit of the goal of the emancipation of women” at its national general council meeting in June, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday. An immediate issue is parity of representation of women in the upcoming local government elections.
A dinner date Romeo wooed lonely Hong Kong women over the internet, then took them for expensive meals and fled, leaving them to pay the bills, a news report said Friday. The sly charmer took them out for lavish dinners, then asked to use their mobile phones to make a business call and fled shortly before the bill was due to arrive, The South China Morning Post reported.