Zimbabwe Bank Prints 100 Trillion-dollar Bills
As a result of having the world’s highest inflation rate, Zimbabwe’s central bank announced it’ll be printing $100 trillion bills soon, reports CNN. “In a move meant to ensure that the public has access to money from banks, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has introduced a new family of bank notes that gradually will come into circulation, starting with the 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollar,” said the bank in a statement. The bank is also set to release 50-trillion, 20-trillion and 10-trillion dollar notes. The trillion-dollar bills are worth about $300 U.S. dollars. A loaf of bread costs about 300 billion Zimbabwe dollars and is increasing each day. The official inflation rate was 231 million percent as of July and merchants along with working-class people are struggling to keep up. Because of the rapidly deteriorating Zimbabwe dollar, many are refusing to accept payment in the country’s currency, preferring either the U.S. dollar or South African rand or the Botswana pula instead. Doctors and teachers have left their jobs in mass, demanding that they be paid in foreign currency. The doctors’ strike comes at a time when the nation is in the grips of a cholera epidemic; the teacher strike has left schools unable to reopen this year.

Nigerian Nurses Strike in Barbados
Nigerian nurses, employed at a hospital in Barbados, walked off their jobs Tuesday, reports Caribbean Net. The nurses, who work at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, were reacting to a news report by the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that aired Monday night. According to the report, three Nigerian nurses died of AIDS while working at the hospital. The nurses are requesting that the National Union of Public Workers take care of the issue.  In addition, the Nigeria Nurses Association is demanding the CBC retract the report, saying it hurt the nurses’ reputation as professionals. The CBC isn’t budgin, though. “We stand by what we carried. We stand by the veracity of our report,” Richard Cox, CBC’s director of news, told a local paper.