Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza’s Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma’a Abu Me’tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night.
Questions about Barack Obama’s inability to win over white, working-class voters were raised again tonight when Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory in West Virginia, one of the last contests of a prolonged primary season. Exit polls indicated she had won the state easily, by a margin of two to one.
The shady streets of Rangoon, one of Asia’s greenest cities, could have been changed forever by Cyclone Nargis, which knocked down many of its 100-year-old trees. People in Burma’s biggest city fear the storm’s 190 km/h winds not only took lives but also ruined livelihoods, dealing a blow to an already fragile tourism industry.
Our Constitution includes a range of socio-economic rights. The challenge to the judiciary was to achieve a balance between enforcement of these rights and deferring to the policy choices of a democratically elected government. The judiciary has precious little precedent to assist it in protecting entrenched rights without so burdening the state with judicially inserted requirements that the latter cannot properly perform its functions.
Queues for petrol on British petrol station forecourts appear to bear scant relation to ongoing killing, rape and mass refugee movements in eastern Congo. The unfolding humanitarian disaster in ungoverned Somalia likewise seems unconnected to Western taxpayers’ worries about falling mortgage lending and rising prices.
As a perky little girl, Veronica McKay used a big stick to round up her three siblings and everyone else in her vicinity to come to her "school". Sitting them down, she made them learn whatever she had put on her chalkboard.
There is no doubt house prices are starting to weaken. This week Standard Bank’s Property Gauge showed an 8,6% fall in property prices for April. Houses are increasingly being sold at below their initial asking price and are staying on the market for longer, says the bank’s report.
The Democratic Alliance has called on the Speaker of Parliament to explain why a decision has been made to stop further investigations into MPs implicated in the Travelgate scandal. This follows publication of a notice directing liquidators ”not to pursue any action as against the various members of Parliament in relation to the un-invoiced tickets, levies and/or services”.
Willy Madisha was trying to ”milk dry” the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), it claimed in a statement on Tuesday. Cosatu had already spent R235 237 on the commission into Madisha’s conduct which recommended he be axed as its president, said spokesperson Patrick Craven.
Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool has proposed community food gardens on state land as one solution to rocketing food prices. ”Government and society cannot close our eyes to the increasing hardship and the struggle of many families to put food on the table,” he told the provincial legislature on Tuesday.