Power cuts to plunge S Africa into darkness

Africa's most industrialised economy South Africa is again facing sweeping power cuts, caused by failures at ageing and poorly maintained infrastructure, the nationalised utility company said. The boss of state-owned Eskom Andre de Ruyter announced 'a high stage of load shedding this week', using jargon for planned outages. On an eight notch scale of rolling blackouts, the country has reached the sixth critical stage. Residents and businesses will face several outages of several hours daily. Level six was seen in June in the middle of the southern winter amid an increase in energy consumption and pressure on production. -- AFP