India has the Nehru jacket and South Africa has Nelson Mandela's flowery Madiba shirt, but in Kenya, an attempt to throw off the colonial shackles of the Western business suit is proving less successful. A government-sponsored competition to create a national dress has resulted in a design that looks unmistakably African, but has so far failed to win over the public.

The United States's Gulf Coast was braced for disaster on Saturday night as a killer hurricane headed for the US after wreaking havoc in the Caribbean. Hurricane Dennis has killed at least 32 people in Haiti and Cuba and is expected to make landfall anywhere from Louisiana to the Florida panhandle by Sunday afternoon.

Insult has been added to injury for the 24-year-old woman who survived a horrific gang rape in a cell at the Volksrust police station last month. First the prosecution of the police on duty that night was bungled by poor investigation, now she is being forced to pay a R50 fine for public drunkenness.

The South African Democratic Teachers' Union has turned its back on an opportunity to benefit from being involved in a consortium that bought 6,7% of Telkom, the Sunday Times reported. The Democratic Alliance welcomed the move, saying doing otherwise would have lent legitimacy to the enrichment of African National Congress presidential spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama.

There was good news for rich people on Thursday, when an annual listing of the world's billionaires showed there were more of them than ever. The 793 billionaires making the 2006 list published by Forbes magazine is an increase of 102 on last year. And the rich keep getting richer, with their total net worth up 18%.

Presidential vacations are nothing new: Harry Truman played poker and fished in Key West, Florida; Dwight Eisenhower spent his holidays blasting golf balls at a tree that is named in his honour at Augusta National; while George Bush senior threw horseshoes in the grounds of his home in Maine.

Neon-lit newsstands, groaning under the weight of hundreds of glossy women's magazines, are everywhere in Shanghai and Beijing. And this month China's growing importance to the fashion world was officially recognised -- it got its own Vogue. "Good taste continues its world tour," trumpeted Vogue.com.

Brazil and Peru have announced a $694-million plan for a highway to link Brazil's Amazon basin to the Pacific, raising concerns about further devastation in the rainforest. Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Peru's president, Alejandro Toledo, outlined plans for the 1 137km road linking Amazon river port of Assis in Brazil with Peru's Pacific ports of Matarini, Ilo and San Juan.

Half of young South Africans support the idea that labour laws are slowing job growth, a study released on Monday has found.

Rwandan citizens have been recruited and trained to fight in support of army mutineers in Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a UN report.