A 15-year-old schoolboy and a security guard were crushed to death as hordes of shoppers tried to buy sugar in Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo, reports said on Thursday. Several people were also injured on Wednesday at the Entumbane Shopping Complex, the Zimbabwe state-controlled Chronicle newspaper reported.
The 2008 BMW 5 Series was the worst performer in new side-impact crash tests of luxury sedans by the United States insurance industry. The Acura RL, Kia Amanti and Volvo S80 all earned the highest safety rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, according to results released on Thursday.
The injured Nasief Morris and Elrio van Heerden apart, Bafana Bafana coach Carlos Alberto Parreira included all his tried-and-tested players in a 22-man squad to play 22nd-ranked Scotland in a friendly international at the Pittodrie Stadium in Aberdeen on Wednesday night.
Uganda announced plans on Thursday to send 250 more soldiers to bolster a peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu plagued by the failure of other African nations to commit troops to Somalia. Uganda sent 1Â 600 men to the Somali capital in March as the vanguard of a planned 8Â 000-strong African Union force.
Vlakplaas, the notorious farm used covertly by the apartheid state for murder and torture, will be turned into a national centre for healing, the Science and Technology Department said on Thursday. ”What is happening is that Vlakplaas … will be turned into a national centre for healing,” department spokesperson Nelvis Qekema said.
The Public Protector will launch an investigation into service-delivery protests, he announced on Thursday. Advocate Lawrence Mushwana said the investigation will focus on specific municipalities and will try to establish if public-service protesters have legitimate complaints.
Nigerian troops and gangsters fought gun battles in the oil city of Port Harcourt on Thursday, killing several people, army and private security sources said. The army launched a dawn raid on several criminal hide-outs after six days of street battles between rival gangs last week, and the gangs responded by staging an armed assault on the state government headquarters.
The National Assembly’s communications committee has shortlisted 37 candidates it plans to interview for a position on the 12-member South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) board. The interviews are expected to be held next week, following which a final shortlist will be compiled.
The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) opted on Thursday to increase its key repo rate by 50 basis points to 10%, its monetary policy committee said. The repo is the rate at which the SARB lends to commercial banks, whose prime lending rate will rise — also by 0,5 percentage points — to 13,5%.
The Public Protector is at an "advanced stage" in a reinvestigation of the so-called Oilgate scandal, originally uncovered by the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>. Advocate Lawrence Mushwana says his office is finalising its investigations and a report will be tabled in Parliament soon.