Sasol welcomed on Tuesday the National Treasury’s decision not to impose a windfall tax on synthetic fuel producers. ”Our government’s growth vision for the synthetic fuel sector is encouraging,” said Sasol chief executive Pat Davies. Davies said Sasol had started the first phase of ”significantly expanding” existing synthetic fuels capacity in Secunda.
A break-in at a Durban beachfront flat rented by African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma ”does not appear to be a random act of crime”, a media report said on Tuesday. The report said it appeared the intruder rifled through the ANC deputy president’s documents.
Nasa managers on Monday cleared space shuttle Endeavour and seven astronauts, including a former school teacher who trained with the ill-fated Challenger crew, for launch on Wednesday. The crew plans to spend seven to 10 days at the International Space Station, which is a little more than half finished.
The toll from floods across South Asia soared to nearly 1 900 on Tuesday as water levels in the region’s swollen rivers started to recede. Aid workers struggled to deliver supplies to some of the 28-million people displaced across India, Bangladesh and Nepal by the worst monsoon-triggered flooding in decades.
Ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday that two Russian fighter jets had violated its airspace and dropped a 700kg bomb, but this had not exploded. Shota Utiashvili, the head of the interior ministry’s public relations department, said that the bomb was dropped on the village of Tsitelubani, about 65km north-west of Tbilisi.
All the fuel industry workers who were on strike over the last week would return to work on Tuesday after accepting an 8,5% wage increase. ”We hope that at least by the afternoon shift everybody would have gone back to work,” said Keith Jacobs, spokesperson for the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood, and Allied Workers’ Union.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine from law school accosted me at a breakfast table in a Harare hotel. I introduced him to my breakfast meeting companion, the director of a Southern African regional NGO. Immediately after the introductions my erstwhile schoolmate charged at the NGO director: "You are going to give me a job in an NGO, aren’t you?" The NGO director recovered just enough to ask why my schoolmate wanted a job with an NGO.
It’s a reminder that we live in a global world when in Britain you are as likely to be treated by a South African or a national of another developing country as you are by a British nurse. It’s a trend that the South African government is preparing to take steps to reverse, starting with Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s imminent trip overseas aimed at encouraging South African nurses to come back.
Dengue fever is sweeping South-East Asia in an outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus that is already threatening to become the worst in almost a decade. Hospitals across the region are filling up and the number of deaths mounting, with no country left immune, from the richest, ultra-modern Singapore, to the poorest, such as Laos and Cambodia.
"Determined" is the adjective that seems to fit Linda Olga Nghatsane best. What else do you call a public health practitioner who built up a successful farm in just three years, all in order to combat malnutrition? Last week, her determination was recognised when she won not only the business entrepreneur award, but also the overall title of Shoprite Checkers/SABC2 Woman of the Year 2007.