Metrorail’s attempt to get a Labour Court order to stop a strike that is disrupting its services failed on Monday, the United Transport and Allied Trade Union said. Metrorail workers said they will continue to strike unless the company agrees to a 6,5% wage increase across the board.
Race-based criticism of Judge Hillary Squires at the weekend was not warranted, the South African Human Rights Commission said on Monday. African National Congress Youth League president Fikile Mbalula at the weekend called Judge Squires an ”apartheid judge”, while the Young Communist League accused him of being a racist.
Nando’s, the fast-food chicken outlet, has not been singled out by the government’s Healthy Lifestyle campaign, a spokesperson for the minister of health said on Monday. Media reports said the minister of health was sent a letter by Nando’s demanding she withdraw remarks allegedly made about its food being unhealthy.
Civilisation has outgrown animal bounties, an oceanographic scientist said on Monday following calls to hunt down sharks after an attack on a Cape spear-fisherman. ”Bounties come from the Dark Ages,” said the director of the Oceanographic Research Institute in Durban.
The CEO of the Border Cricket Board in East London and a South African National Defence Force major were among 12 people arrested on Monday on fraud charges, Eastern Cape police said.
Media hoping to interview Deputy President Jacob Zuma on Monday were threatened with arrest outside the African National Congress headquarters. Johannesburg metro police officers told reporters, photographers and cameramen that if they crossed a tape barricade, they would be arrested.
Michael Jackson is physically shattered but ”emotionally resolute” and confident of acquittal as he awaits a jury verdict in his child sexual-molestation case, long-time confidant Reverend Jesse Jackson said in a television interview on Monday. The United States minister said he met with the pop star at a hospital overnight on Sunday.
Chadians turned out early on Monday to cast ballots in a referendum on whether to scrap presidential term limits, a move that would allow President Idriss Deby to run for an unprecedented third term as leader of Africa’s newest oil producer. A loose grouping of about 30 opposition parties urged supporters to boycott the referendum.
African Union-mediated peace talks on the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region are set to open in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, on Friday, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s spokesperson said on Monday. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court in The Hague said it will launch a war-crimes probe into atrocities committed in Darfur.
The chairperson of the African Union has rejected the group’s appointment of a mediator for crisis-hit Togo, saying he wasn’t properly consulted, officials said on Monday. Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who currently holds the rotating AU chairmanship, has led West African efforts to resolve the Togo crisis.