Trade union Solidarity and resources company Kumba Resources started the first day of their annual wage negotiations with Kumba tabling an offer of 4%, while Solidarity demanded an increase of 12%, the union said on Tuesday. "Kumba’s offer to workers at the bottom levels puts them under the breadline in South Africa," Solidarity said.
Silas Masindi was not entirely surprised by his HIV test results. The dapper garment trader, who discovered earlier this year that he was infected with the Aids virus, admits to using condoms somewhat erratically before he remarried three years ago. "I would meet a girl, use a condom, but after four months stop using them," he says.
Amid the massive construction and development drive under way in Dubai that is bringing in each year tens of thousands of expatriates and Asian labourers, and aims to attract 15-million tourists by 2010, a large number of the small native population have resettled on the city’s fringes to preserve cherished tribal and family values.
Zimbabwe’s central bank will issue a new Z$100 000 banknote after inflation topped 1 000% last month, one of the world’s highest rates, a state daily reported on Wednesday. The new banknote, worth US98c, will go into circulation on Thursday and will hold tender until December, the <i>Herald</i> newspaper said. Zimbabwe started introducing bearer cheques with a temporary validity three years ago.
”The dark nations of Africa, strikingly precocious as young children, seemed to come to a standstill in their mental growth at different ages. The Kikuyu, Kawirondo and Wakamba, the people who worked for me on the farm, in early childhood were far ahead of the white children of the same age, but they stopped quite suddenly at a stage corresponding to a European child of nine.”
”If Shell have the guts to come to the Ijaws’ land, we won’t just kidnap their workers, now they will disappear,” threatened Joseph Evah, coordinator of the Ijaw Monitoring Group, in the wake of a court judgement against oil giant Shell. The judgement ordered the company to pay ,5-billion to the Ijaw community in the Niger region of Nigeria for environmental damage in the region.
Some men hold paper tissues under their noses; others wrap their kuffiya ends around their mouths. It is a hot and humid day at the city’s main morgue where 20 men stand in a yard, their faces pressed with silent urgency against the bars of a window, next to a white plastic sign that baldly announces the location of ”The Refrigerator”.
I’ve always believed the military is no place for pussies (feminist gallery: exeunt omnes). And when countries steeped in centuries-old traditions and ideas regarding the place of ”their women” suddenly find themselves in the terrain of a 21st-century war zone, it doesn’t help when the new guy on the block starts rubbing ”his women” in your face.
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The removal of people from the Thamboville informal settlement near Benoni on Johannesburg’s East Rand turned violent when residents clashed with police on Tuesday. Ekurhuleni metro police spokesperson Superintendent Vusi Mabanga said the relocation of residents to Albert Luthuli Park informal settlement, also in Benoni, was supposed to start at 6am.