Dispossessed communities who missed out when the application process for land claims restitution expired in 1998 are pressuring the government to reopen applications ahead of the national Land Summit at the end of the month. The reopening of the process is expected to be one of the most heated debates at the summit.
Nasa’s long-awaited return to manned spaceflight looked in jeopardy on Tuesday night after technicians accidentally chipped part of the space shuttle Discovery less than 24 hours before Wednesday’s scheduled lift off. The space agency worked frantically overnight to assess the damage.
Three women were killed and dozens of people wounded on Tuesday when an 18-year-old suicide bomber blew himself up by a busy junction near a shopping mall in the Israeli seaside town of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. The seriously wounded, including a six-year-old girl who was badly burnt, were taken by helicopter to specialist hospitals around Israel, according to Israel TV.
Three passenger trains collided at a southern Pakistan station early on Wednesday, killing around 150 people and injuring 1 000 in the country’s worst rail disaster for a more than a decade, officials said. Police said the death toll could rise to 300 following the devastating pile-up near the remote town of Ghotki.
The pendulum is swinging in favour of physical education once again with the Department of Education adopting a memorandum of agreement to reinstate physical education at schools.
Heated words are flying between the Department of Education (DoE) and teacher unions as they blame each other for the faltering process of teacher appraisals.
The unpleasant aromas that hover over refuse bins left at the side of the road for collection by Pikitup trucks make one feel sorry for the people loading, unloading and sorting the foul-smelling domestic waste. It has been said that one can judge the level of civilisation of societies by the way they treat women, children, the elderly and animals. One should add waste — and the environment — to the list.
Watching the retarded grunting locally that passes for behaviour in society and the government, you could easily forget that there is a larger picture to human endeavour that isn’t bogged down in ethnic differences, or in the stupid, regressive dredging up of old history of which few of us were even part. Out in the real world, things are getting odd and interesting on multiple fronts.
It is tempting to call it a no-brainer: the idea that attempts to prevent transmission of HIV from mothers to children should be matched by initiatives to keep these mothers alive after they give birth. For all this, efforts in South Africa to prioritise the health of HIV-positive mothers have fallen short over past years.
The clothing sector is sometimes called the rag trade. Rags and riches may be more apt. If you work, for instance, as a machinist in the rag trade in a KwaZulu-Natal area such as Newcastle, you can expect to earn a union-sanctioned wage of just R228 a week. The same industry, though, paid R10-million to Edcon chief executive Steve Ross last year, nearly 1 000 times that of the machinist’s annual wages.