A day after one of the most travelled sections of freeway in the San Francisco Bay area melted and collapsed following a fiery crash, residents on Monday began what could be their worst commute in almost two decades. ”I’ve never seen anything like it,” said officer Trent Cross, of the California Highway Patrol.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions says it was forced to cancel May Day celebrations in four provinces after militant supporters of President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party allegedly threatened to murder union officials if the celebrations went ahead.
A stretch of vital highway for San Francisco Bay-area commuters collapsed on Sunday after a gas tanker truck crashed and ignited flames that shot more than 60m high, officials said. Flames on a lower ramp melted the upper deck of a highway on the Oakland/Emeryville side leading to the double-decker Bay Bridge.
On Sunday France delivered confirmation, for most political pundits, of a popular shift to the right. Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate, emerged comfortably ahead of the Socialist Ségolène Royal, and the total vote of the right in the first round of the presidential election outweighed that of the left.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) intends to grasp the opportunity that the ANC’s policy and national conferences provide to campaign for a programme that will advance the cause of the workers and the poor. We will judge the ANC’s 13 draft policy documents by the degree to which they promise real improvements in the lives of the majority, writes Zwelinzima Vavi.
Ace Magashule, the Free State African National Congress (ANC) chairperson, has made a scathing attack at a regional conference on supporters from the Thabo Mofutsanyane district in the eastern part of the province, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Saturday.
For six weeks, Andre van Zijl has been pumping petrol around the clock at a petrol station in Knysna. Why? To raise awareness about HIV/Aids. The 57-year-old Aids campaigner aims to log 1Â 000 working hours this week in his latest publicity stunt to highlight the devastating scale of the Aids epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
France’s right-wing presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy was embroiled in a free-speech row on Friday after a defeated candidate accused him of stifling a televised election debate. Francois Bayrou said Sarkozy had subverted basic democratic freedoms of free speech by using contacts to pull the plug on Saturday’s scheduled debate.
At least 200 000 people die every year from cancers related to their workplaces, mainly from inhaling asbestos fibres and second-hand tobacco smoke, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday. The United Nations agency said every 10th lung cancer death is related to occupational hazards, and about 125-million people worldwide are exposed to asbestos at work.
There are signs that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is mulling a policy shift that could tilt Africa’s booming economic powerhouse to the left after more than a decade on a centrist course. The ANC is under growing pressure from trade-union allies and its own rank-and-file to make income redistribution and nationalisation the lynchpins of its programme.