The Department of Health on Monday urged the public to report pharmacists not abiding by the maximum R26 dispensing fee rule for medication. The government insists this is the legal maximum that pharmacists may charge. ”We urge South Africans to refuse to be subjected to this exploitation,” the department said.

The president of Harvard University has provoked a furore by arguing that men outperform women in maths and sciences because of biological difference, and discrimination is no longer a career barrier for female academics. Lawrence Summers, a career economist who served as treasury secretary under former United States president Bill Clinton, has a reputation for outspokenness.

More than 500-million people can escape poverty and tens of millions can avoid otherwise certain death if the United States, Japan and other rich nations keep their promises to vastly increase development aid over the next decade, a report said on Monday.

Insurgents in Iraq intent on derailing elections due in less than two weeks stepped up a campaign of violence across the country on Monday, claiming dozens more lives in shootings and car bombings. A campaign of assassinations has claimed victims from north to south Iraq.

New evidence of alleged attacks on opposition supporters in Zimbabwe has been passed to British newspaper The Guardian by activists who say they are being subjected to systematic violence, intimidation and sexual abuse in the run-up to elections in March. In one case, a woman who chaired a constituency group said she was covered in paraffin and set alight.