Two striking security guards have been arrested for setting fire to a warehouse at a Mondi paper mill, causing millions of rands in damage — this against a backdrop of intensifying industrial action and solidarity strikes. Business Unity South Africa has urged the warring parties to break the two-month-long strike deadlock.
The arrest last week of South African and other security operatives in Kinshasa has less to do with an attempted coup — as Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) officials allege — than the operatives’ remote link to veteran opposition figure Etienne Tshisekedi, say Western diplomats in the Congolese capital.
One of the most important influences on the financial markets is the herd instinct. This applies to professional traders and economic analysts as much as to the general public. Often they dare not be caught out if everyone else seems to be buying or selling, so they join the rush.
Breakfast with Amy Pascal is just how a meeting with a Hollywood studio boss should be. In just over an hour, the co-head of Sony Pictures Entertainment was hugged by a movie star (Paul Bettany), a bestselling author (Dan Brown) and a scion of the Kennedy clan (Bobby Shriver). And when she talks of ”Steven”, she is, of course, referring to Spielberg.
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Divisions in the African National Congress are being galvanised by a crisis of self-definition and have created a vacuum in the party — a vacuum that the South African Communist Party has moved to fill by suggesting that unless the SACP decisively intervenes, the needs of the poor will never be met.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has launched a stinging attack on President Thabo Mbeki that appears to reiterate what was contained in the hard-hitting South African Communist Party discussion document released last week. On Thursday Cosatu said it was primarily concerned that the ANC leadership was "drifting towards dictatorship".
Turkish authorities were on Thursday investigating a large fire that destroyed the cargo terminal at the country’s biggest airport, responsibility for which was claimed by radical Kurdish militants. The police sealed off the badly damaged building at the Atatürk International airport and were examining tapes from security cameras, the Anatolia news agency reported.
A bomb blast killed three people and wounded 11 in one of Baghdad’s main squares on Thursday as the interim defence minister said restoring security to the capital was top priority for the new government. The force of the explosion levelled a building on Tahrir Square in the capital’s commercial heart, one of a series of attacks around the country.
Eight people have been arrested in connection with the death of several people on trains in Gauteng recently, the police and Metrorail said on Thursday. The group was arrested on the West Rand and in Pretoria and would face charges of attempted murder, Senior Superintendent Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said in a statement.