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/ 11 February 2008
The "specialist nature" of the Scorpions might well be retained, wherever the unit is finally located, President Thabo Mbeki said on Sunday. He said the government remained firmly committed to ensuring South Africa’s capacity to fight organised crime was enhanced, not reduced.
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/ 11 February 2008
Records tumble as the oil majors release their annual results. The most profit made by any company ever: ExxonMobil’s $40-billion. Amid the noise about capital allocation and windfall taxes, there is a danger of missing the most important results of all. The oil and gas production of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil and Chevron is going down, not up.
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/ 11 February 2008
In recent years Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church has become home to destitute and desperate South Africans — and a sanctuary for refugees and asylum-seekers from Zimbabwe and elsewhere. At 11pm on January 30 the South African Police Service (SAPS) raided the church apparently in search of guns, drugs and illegal immigrants.
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/ 11 February 2008
Oil giant Shell recorded the biggest annual profits in British corporate history recently at $27,6-billion, causing a storm of protest from trade union leaders and green groups who said the “obscene” profits came at the expense of motorists, pensioners and the environment and suggested it should be met with a windfall tax.
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/ 11 February 2008
Service providers, it appears, are taking management of our finances into their own hands by assuming that we are unable to make provisions for regular debit orders. This month two debit orders ran off our household account early. I noticed because they went off before pay day and as a result bounced.
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/ 11 February 2008
You’re put in your place the moment you drive down the track that leads into Laverstoke Park, Jody Scheckter’s organic farm near Basingstoke. Every few metres there’s a small sign, each a little bit bossier than the last. "Do not use polyunsaturated oils for cooking, sautéing or baking." "Eat beef, lamb, game, poultry and offal from pasture-fed animals."
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/ 11 February 2008
Holed up in a caravan on the campus of Stanford University in California, two graduate students were supposed to be finishing their doctoral studies. Instead, Jerry Yang and David Filo began messing around on something new called the world wide web. Yang and Filo started fiddling with quirky home pages. Yang put up his golf scores, his name in Chinese characters and a list of his favourite websites.
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/ 11 February 2008
Eskom’s countdown to catastrophe began in 2000 when it had enough coal stockpiled to last 61 days. Last month, when it shut down the country’s mines, the stockpiles were down to less than three days’ supply. A deliberate policy began in 2000 to reduce the coal stockpile to better manage operating costs.
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/ 11 February 2008
From a distance Shadrack Monkhe bears an uncanny resemblance to the Collect-a-Can man seen in the recycling organisation’s advertisements. At the edge of a road in Vanderbijlpark, he pushes a wheelbarrow heaped to capacity with littered beverage containers. Even the setting is appropriate.
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/ 11 February 2008
I’ve never really been taken in by the whole “men in dresses, beard and Kalashnikov” combo. The same goes for the awe and fear the image inspires in certain quarters. Then again, I’m no Salman Rushdie. I’ve been known to don the occasional burqa — but only for festive purposes, and not on pain of death.