South African company Pensant Consulting has finalised a $10-million deal with the Italian owners of <i>National Geographic</i>’s merchandising rights, the Italian-South African Chamber of Trade and Industries announced on Friday. Local operations will have a strong black economic empowerment component.
Shackled and handcuffed in pairs, the 70 men sporting bushy beards and khaki prison uniforms shuffle silently into a barn-like building surrounded by barbed wire fences and imposing walls. It is here in Chikurubi Maximum Security prison that the magistrate’s court sits in judgement over the suspected mercenaries arrested on charges of plotting a coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea.
British, French and German officials met their Iranian counterparts in Paris on Thursday to try to salvage the agreement by which Tehran promised not to develop a nuclear weapons programme. Pessimism is growing in the Foreign Office where there is now a belief that Iran is intent on creating the capacity to produce a nuclear bomb.
Ibiza’s famed dance-till-dawn club nights will be lacking many of the drugs that fuel them this summer: the Spanish police say they have made their biggest seizure of the stuff that makes Ecstasy. The raw material for at least 200 000 Ecstasy tablets was found on its way from Holland as the island filled up for the summer with clubbers from Britain and the rest of Europe.
The JSE Securities Exchange (JSE) was firm in noon trade on Friday on the back of futures buying despite a stronger rand. At 12.11pm, the all-share index was up 0,59%. Both the resources and gold mining indices climbed 1,22%. The all share industrial index edged up 0,15%.
The Department of Justice expects the auditor general to give its management a clean bill of health — but Deputy Minister of Justice Johnny de Lange clearly does not share this optimistic view. De Lange said recently that there were too many managers, and they were not working in tandem for the benefit of the department.
”The M&G‘s cover story last week (‘Furore over ”mutant” Aids vaccine’) is a source of dismay, writes Ed Rybicki of the University of Cape Town’s department of molecular and cell biology. ”Put simply, without all the negative spin, the story is this: the South African Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, and various partners, will attempt to produce various vaccines and monoclonal antibodies in plants.”
Health workers in the northern Nigerian state of Kano will on Saturday launch a drive to immunise more than four million infants against polio, despite ongoing opposition from Islamic radicals. Since August last year, Kano has become the epicentre of the world’s fastest-growing outbreak of the crippling virus.
Scorpion investigators were moving in on parliamentarians this week after arresting seven travel agents in the unfolding multimillion-rand travel voucher scam. ”Further action is imminent,” confirmed Scorpions spokesperson Sipho Ngwema on Thursday, refusing to be drawn beyond saying that ”the next phase is concentrating on MPs”.
Microsoft may be best known for its dominant Windows product, but on Thursday Bill Gates touted software that’s far afield from your basic operating system. How about software that can recognise a picture of a bar code taken with your cell phone, and provide you with product information?