LOCAL Six people have died when a taxi collided with a light motor vehicle on the N1 between Beaufort West and Leeuw Gamka. A spokesperson for Western Cape Transport, Jandre Bakker says the collision took place in the early hours of Thursday morning. He says three children died in the collision. “In the minibus taxi, the male driver died. In the light motor vehicle, the male driver, his male passenger […]
LOCAL The latest festive season fatality statistics paint a grim picture, with a 142% spike in crashes with multiple fatalities. There have been 17 this year, compared with seven over the same period in 2020. The number of fatalities from major crashes also increased from 34 last year to 111 this year, said transport minister Fikile Mbalula, who released provisional statistics at the R80 Soshanguve highway in Pretoria on Wednesday. “Year-on-year, […]
University of the Western Cape officials said the move to shutdown campus residences was taken in line with their mandatory COVID vaccination policy. On Friday night night, students returned to their dorms to find they'd been locked out. A student, who asked to remain anonymous, said some students were left to sleep outside or on the streets while others locked themselves in their rooms to avoid eviction. "I told them […]
As the country enters the coronavirus fourth wave, emergency centre staff are exhausted and need the public’s help this festive season, in particular to ensure that the emergency centres (ECs) at hospitals across the province and the country keep running. New Somerset Hospital emergency medical specialist Dr Roger Dickerson said staff, who have shouldered three waves of the virus and are now at the start of a fourth wave, are […]
Canada has announced that it will be lifting its travel ban on South Africa and nine other African countries following criticism. The ban was imposed last month to curb the transmission of the Omicron variant that was discovered by South Africa. On Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the increase in Omicron cases was scary. Critics said the ban on travellers from 10 African countries made no sense given […]
Thousands of people in the Philippines fled their homes and beachfront resorts as Super Typhoon Rai pummelled the country on Thursday, with a charity warning the storm could hit coastal communities "like a freight train". Rai is the strongest storm to hit the disaster-prone archipelago this year. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 195km/h as it made landfall on the southern island of Siargao at 1:30pm, the state weather […]
Hundreds of prisoners set fire to a Thai jail during a two-day riot over the handling of a coronavirus cluster, with some inmates wounded as officers sought to restore order. Thai prisons are notoriously overcrowded and have struggled to curb the spread of the virus, more than 87,000 inmates have been infected with 185 recorded deaths, according to the Corrections Department. Authorities were set to inspect the damage on Saturday […]
The Health Department said that discussions were ongoing on the Pfizer booster shots. Booster doses for adults who received the two-dose Pfizer vaccine have been approved by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra). The department’s acting Director-General Dr Nicholas Crisp said that the interval that had been approved was six months, adding that the first people to qualify to receive the booster was on 28 December. "We're hoping […]
The COVID-19 infection rate remains high with 20,713 new cases reported in the past 24 hours, representing a 30.4% positivity rate in a day. This pushes our known caseload to more than 3,276,000 positive cases. The National Institute of Communicable Diseases said a further 35 COVID-19 related deaths were reported, bringing official total fatalities to 90,297. On the vaccination front more than 27,496,000 doses have been administered meaning over 2,975,000 […]
VOC became the first Muslim radio station in South Africa when a special events license was granted to the station in Ramadan/January 1995. Subsequent temporary broadcast licenses were granted, permitting the station to broadcast for 24 hours.
