At least 29 dead bodies have been discovered and identified by police as illegal miners recovered from a shaft after an underground explosion in South Africa last week, Times South Africa reported.
Some of the survivors of the blast, who were taken into police custody, said that more bodies still lie underground. Most of the dead miners reportedly come from neighboring countries such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Illegal mining is common in South Africa, a major producer of gold and platinum.
The mine where the explosion occurred, located near the town of Welkom in Free State province, was once owned by the Harmony Gold company, the third-largest gold mining company in South Africa, before it was shut down.
Microsoft Looks to Capitalize on Africa
As many big tech companies look to capitalize on developing Africa, Microsoft announced plans Thursday, May 18, to begin creating giant data centers in the continent in order to promote business.
To start, the technology company will open data centers in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa, by 2018 delivering more efficient services like Office 365 to users in the region.
“We’re excited by the growing demand for cloud services in Africa and their ability to be a catalyst for new economic opportunities,” Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president of cloud and enterprise, said in a statement.
Although companies in Africa can access cloud-based services, those services are typically delivered from data centers located outside of Africa, which could make them slower or more prone to going offline.
Microsoft said that by opening data centers in Africa, customers would be able to store their data locally, which could satisfy any regulations prohibiting companies from keeping that data outside the country.
First Spaceship Research Center Comes to Ghana
The first spaceship research center in Africa is coming to Ghana at the Atomic Energy Commission enclave at Haatso in Accra.
An agreement to construct the KESHE Spaceship Research Centre was signed May 1. The initiative seeks to bring cutting-edge technologies to Ghana to boost the government’s job-creation agenda.
Expected to be erected by 2018, the engineering plans are now slated to begin by the third quarter of this year and be completed in six months.
KESHE Foundation Ghana, a non-governmental organization (NGO), is partnering with BONADES Limited, a Ghanaian construction and engineering company, to implement the project, myjoyonline.com reported.
“KESHE Foundation International intends to invest a total of $21 million in this project,” said Mehran Tavakoli Keshe of KESHE Foundation Ghana. “It is in line with President Nana Akufo-Addo’s ‘one district, one factory’ agenda to also provide decent sustainable job opportunities to ordinary citizens and high-earned skilled world-class technologists and scientists.”