Hollywood seems to have embraced the South African reality of crime, grime and poverty after Tsotsi won the best foreign-language film Oscar on Sunday. The story of a violent young criminal living dangerously in and around the townships of Johannesburg has been lauded for its apt depiction of life for millions today.
The United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has told British MPs that military action could bring Iran’s nuclear programme to a halt if all diplomatic efforts fail. The warning came ahead of a meeting on Monday of the International Atomic Energy Agency which will forward a report on Iran’s nuclear activities to the UN security council.
Bernd Pischetsrieder, chief executive of Volkswagen, comes out fighting for his job on Tuesday against a campaign by his chairperson, Ferdinand Piech, to unseat him. Piech began an open power struggle within VW last week by publicly questioning whether the former BMW director deserved to have his contract extended for another five years.
Of course I knew it was a hoax. The phone rang and I made the mistake of answering it. It asked, in halting, Spanish-accented tones, if I spoke Afrikaans. That’s when I knew it was a hoax. "I have a story to tell," she continued, in English, after I had assured her that I did not speak a word of Afrikaans.
"As the Palestinian ambassador to South Africa, I would also like to share my views with your readers after reading Ilan Baruch’s article . As the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, one expects Baruch to be objective in his approach regarding the political rights of the Palestinian people," writes Ali Halimeh.
The South African business and mining landscape has just witnessed a low-key move by a giant in continental, or rather, global business. Sam Jonah, former executive president of AngloGold Ashanti, announced his biggest personal investment in South Africa. This marks a further entrenchment of roots in a new country by this Ghanaian native.
Residents in Harare say they live on a "cholera time-bomb" as the Zimbabwean city struggles to clean up garbage and maintain sewers in an outbreak that has already cost 27 lives. An unusually wet rainy season compounds the problem, especially in slum areas like Dzivarasekwa, about 10km north of the city, and the sprawling semi-urban area of Epworth, to the east.
The head of the world’s nuclear watchdog declared recently that he could not give Iran’s nuclear programme a clean bill of health, blaming Tehran for frustrating almost three years of inspections and detective work by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
British Finance Minister Gordon Brown’s plan to increase aid for poor countries received a hefty boost recently when France and Britain agreed to raise billions of dollars for health and education by floating bonds on the world’s financial markets.
After weeks of behind-the-scenes haggling, Paris and London struck a compromise deal.
At last the battlelines have been drawn, and the first major fight over climate change is about to begin. All over Britain, a coalition of homeowners and anarchists, of Nimbys and internationalists, is mustering to fight the greatest future cause of global warming: the growth of aviation.