Tuesday May 10, 2011

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Jessica Hannah

Making headlines:

The ANC "didn't know" about 1600 toilets in a Free State municipality which have been left without enclosures for the past eight years, secretary general Gwede Mantashe said. He added that the ANC would take serious action on this. The toilets are located in Rammulotsi, near Viljoenskroon, in the ANC-run Moqhaka municipality. "It should not happen, it cannot happen," he said. Earlier, SA Human Rights Commission spokesperson, Vincent Moaga, said the body's legal committee would discuss the issue after a complaint had been laid with the commission.

Nato launched a number of missile strikes against targets in the Tripoli area on Tuesday that appeared to include Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's compound, witnesses said. Libyan officials said four children were wounded, two of them seriously, by flying glass caused by blasts from Nato strikes in the Tripoli area overnight. Officials showed foreign journalists a hospital in the Libyan capital where some windows had been shattered, apparently due to the blast waves from a Nato strike that toppled a nearby telecommunications tower. "The direction of at least one blast suggests Gaddafi's compound has been targeted," said one witness.

Samwu's national leadership had been locked in closed door meetings with the ANC and Cosatu for most of yesterday and had welcomed the commitment made by the ANC, to look into all areas of concern raised by the union.South African municipal workers have suspended their strike planned for Friday after talks with the African National Congress (ANC), South African Municipal Workers' Union (Samwu) spokesperson Tahir Sema said. Some 220 000 municipal workers, excluding essential services, were planning a nationwide strike on Friday, five days before local government elections. Sema said on Monday the union had various concerns, chief among them that local government had failed.

Also making headlines:
The long-term viability of South Africa's economy is being eroded by a steady flow of above-inflation wage deals that have been making the country's overall labour market less competitive.
The US is studying ways to support Egypt's economy following Hosni Mubarak's overthrow, the US embassy said on Monday.
And, Chad's President Idriss Deby won a presidential election by a landslide, according to official results released on Monday, but the outcome was rejected by the opposition as illegitimate, after an election boycott.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.