Hurricane Dean is expected to grow into a ferocious category-five storm as it passes Jamaica and nears Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the oil and gas rigs of the Gulf of Mexico after it smashed into several Caribbean islands, the United States National Hurricane Centre said on Friday.
More than 180 coal miners were trapped underground in eastern China on Saturday after heavy rain caused a river to flood and inundate two separate pits, the latest accident to hit the world’s deadliest mining industry. The official Xinhua news agency said 584 miners were rescued after Friday’s incident.
Southern African leaders failed on Friday to heed calls for strong action against the embattled Zimbabwean government, saying the ailing country’s problems are ”exaggerated”. ”We feel they [Zimbabwe] will solve their economic problems,” the chairperson of the Southern African Development Community told journalists.
The Eastern Cape government has rejected a claim by a suspended hospital official that 200 babies have been dying every month at East London’s two largest hospitals. The former deputy manager of the East London Hospital Complex, Dr Nokuzola Ntshona, made the claim in an interview published in the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>.
Black-owned investment company Shanduka broke its silence on Friday over the appointment of Bruce Campbell as executive chairperson at Alexander Forbes. The Black Management Forum on Wednesday condemned Campbell’s being appointed to oversee a ”competent black CEO”.
President Thabo Mbeki and the opposition leader, Helen Zille of the Democratic Alliance, crossed swords on Friday in the internet letters they send each week to their supporters. Both were talking about sacked deputy minister of health Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge.
Hurricane Dean tore through the eastern Caribbean islands of St Lucia and Martinique on Friday, ripping the roofs from a hospital and homes, felling trees and flinging boulders and a boat on to roads. The first hurricane of the Atlantic season, packing 160km/h winds, tore the roof off the children’s ward at Victoria Hospital in Castries.
A crowd burned a church compound on Friday in one of Africa’s largest slums after a long-running land dispute flared into violence, witnesses and police said. Nobody was injured. Police said there was a dispute between the local Nubian community, which is mainly Muslim, and the Presbyterian Church over land ownership.
Peruvian rescue teams scrambled on Friday to find survivors in the disaster zone of a powerful earthquake that killed about 500 people and where an aftershock of 6,0 magnitude struck on Friday, the United States Geological Survey and witnesses said. The main quake of 8,0 magnitude hit on Wednesday.
Fires that engulfed five Mpumalanga municipalities, killing an old man and injuring a number of others, have been extinguished, the Department of Local Government and Housing said on Friday. Mopping-up operations were under way at the Mbombela, Albert Luthuli, Emakhazeni, Umjindi and Bushbuckridge municipalities.