Twenty-five years after the first Aids cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic that is likely to spread to every corner of the globe. A new United Nations Aids agency report declares that the world’s response to the disease that has infected about 65-million people and killed 25-million has been nowhere near adequate.
An alleged member of an international fraud syndicate, believed to have been involved in defrauding local and foreign Standard Bank customers, is to appear in court on Thursday. The man was arrested after a joint investigation by the bank and the National Prosecuting Authority’s Scorpions unit into internet banking fraud.
The Cecelia Makiwane hospital in East London was again the scene of anger and protest on Tuesday, following the death of four babies at the hospital last week, media reports said. About 200 members of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) protested outside the hospital and, like the families, they want answers.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Tuesday he still plans to visit Zimbabwe, contradicting a government spokesperson who said his invitation was no longer valid. Annan has been planning for a year to visit Zimbabwe to see the outcome of a slum-clearance operation that has left about 700Â 000 people homeless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
”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.