Three troops of rowdy baboons are harassing Zeerust residents by rummaging for food in rubbish bins in the North West town. The baboons, numbering about 30, first showed up at the Abjaterskop hotel just outside the town a few months ago. The hotel is near the rubbish dump, which has been moved closer to town recently.
A person leapt in panic from the first floor of the Rand International hotel in Bree Street, Johannesburg, on Tuesday afternoon to escape a fire raging through two shops below on street level. ”The fire was not even in that part of the building,” said Johannesburg fire and emergency services spokesperson Malcolm Midgley.
South Africa’s new Deputy President, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, made a four-hour visit to Zimbabwe on Tuesday for talks with President Robert Mugabe and his deputy that she said will help Pretoria ”synchronise” its policies with Harare. It was her first official trip to Zimbabwe since her appointment three weeks ago.
Governments succeed only if they use public service delivery to structure a society in which social justice can prevail, Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said on Wednesday. She was addressing public-sector managers at the fourth annual Service Delivery Learning Academy in Cape Town.
South Africa could experience a slump in fixed capital formation growth after the 2010 Soccer World Cup, which could hamper economic growth, Absa corporate and merchant bank transport and construction industry analyst John Loos has warns in a report released on Wednesday.
Norwegian homosexuals are set to launch their own soda brand, called Homo Light, at an upcoming gastronomic festival, in the hope that it will help promote tolerance, one of the authors of the project said on Monday. "The goal is not for us to make money but to make us more visible and accepted," Oeystein Mauritzen said.
Twenty-four Iraqi children were killed on Wednesday morning by a suicide car bomber in Baghdad, as sectarian tensions were stoked when 11 Sunni Arabs were found shot dead after allegedly being arrested by police commandos. Another 18 children were wounded in the blast, which targeted a United States military convoy.
Sixty-six people, at least 22 of them children, were killed in a brutal raid on a remote village in northeastern Kenya in what is believed to be the country’s worst single episode of inter-clan violence to date. ”The situation is very sad on the ground, everybody is mourning the dead,” said Bonaya Godana, a former Kenyan foreign minister.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) demanded on Tuesday that the pirates who commandeered a commercial vessel chartered to transport food aid to 28 000 tsunami survivors in Somalia release the ship, its cargo and crew within 48 hours. The <i>MV Semlow</i> was hijacked on June 27.
The JSE was mixed, but nevertheless marginally higher, at midday on Wednesday after reaching another record high earlier in the morning. Dealers said that the rand was playing a key role, weighing on gold and platinum stocks, but benefiting banks.