STRIKING public workers in Zambia have scaled down their demands from a 100% pay hike to a “reasonable” salary increment, a union leader said on Monday. “We have come down from our initial demand. We have asked the government to give us a reasonable offer,” said Darison Chaala, secretary general of the Civil Servants Union […]
UGANDANS go to the polls on Tuesday to vote in legislative elections held in the wake of a moderately volatile campaign and under a system which prohibits political parties from functioning normally. At stake are 214 of the 295 seats in Uganda’s seventh parliament since independence. The other seats are reserved for special groups such […]
SIX people died in a massive protest against the government of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on June 14, according to a new official toll. A previous official toll had put the number of casualties at four dead and 946 injured. The protest was the biggest seen in the north African country since it declared independence from […]
Cape Town | Tuesday CONSERVATIONISTS on Monday said only 7% of the thousands of penguins oiled after a carrier ship sank off South Africa a year ago, have been seen breeding again, indicating that spills might make the birds sterile. About 33% of those who were clean but were evacuated to swim back are breeding” […]
A POWERFUL political group from northern Nigeria said on Monday it has hired 20 lawyers to counter claims made to the country’s human rights panel over the two military coups of 1966. The Arewa Consultative Forum’s general secretary, Inuwa Abdulkadir, said the lawyers were hired to counter claims made by the Ohaneze Ndigbo, a group […]
TWO South African organisations that have threatened to invade farms have accused the government of wrongfully arresting 19 alleged land invaders in Kuruman in the Northern Cape. The Mpumalanga Labour Tenants Committee (MLTC) and the Free State Farming Community on Monday expressed their “anger and disappointment” with the arrests. The 19 members of the Groot […]
ABOUT 50 Ugandan army and police officers have fled their country for Rwanda, where they are seeking political asylum. The Ugandan Monitor newspaper at the weekend named some of the officers who fled as Colonel Samson Mande, a former military attach in Tanzania who in January appeared before a court martial on terrorism charges, Lieutenant […]
THREE passengers were killed and about 50 injured when a train derailed on Cameroon’s main north-south line between the capital Yaounde and the northwestern town of Ngaoundere, CAMRAIL announced on Monday. An official in the national railway company said that the train had been carrying more than a thousand passengers when it derailed on Sunday, […]
AN Egyptian factory manager and 13 of his colleagues died when a weekend fire swept through their tile factory south of Cairo following a gas leak, police said on Monday. Rescue workers on Sunday recovered 12 charred bodies, including that of manager Adel Abdelatif, upon entering the gutted Pharaohs Factory in Ushim, 100km south of […]
LISA RICHWINE, United Nations | Tuesday WINNING the battle against Aids requires helping young African women and girls achieve sexual and economic equality to protect themselves from the deadly disease, government officials said on Monday. Aids infection rates are rising rapidly among young women and girls in many African countries. In Mozambique, HIV rates for […]