Banking group Absa says that house-price growth is at its lowest in four-and-a-half years. According to the latest Absa house-price index, nominal year-on-year growth of 13,6% was recorded in June this year compared with a growth rate of 14,3% in May. This was the lowest year-on-year growth since January 2002 when it was also 13,6%.
The Second Network Operator (SNO) will deliver business services from the end of the year and general services for the public from next year. ”The SNO has adopted a phased approach to rolling-out its services,” managing director Ajay Pandey said in the statement. ”We are currently in discussion with various potential customers and are now in advanced stages of readiness to deliver.”
Wimbledon semifinalist Kim Clijsters believes China’s history-making Li Na has all the weapons to shoot her into the world’s elite. The Belgian defeated Li 6-4, 7-5 on Tuesday to reach the last four at the All England Club, but Li wasn’t disgraced and had plenty to be pleased about having become the first Chinese player to make the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam.
A former national guard captain whose military service was supposed to end seven years ago was sent to Iraq for a year by mistake because of an incorrect discharge date in his records. Jim Dillinger was 43 when he received a letter from the Defence Department in May 2004 saying he was one of 5 600 members of the Individual Ready Reserve being sent to Iraq.
There is little to break the silence at Kolwezi, once the economic powerhouse of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), now a landscape of industrial desolation. Potholed roads lead to ruined, rusted factories. Trucks and bulldozers are lined up neatly, as if ready to roll, but the wheels are missing and the engines have cobwebs.
Palestinians holding an Israeli soldier said on Tuesday that they had ended negotiations on his fate after Israel ignored an ultimatum to begin releasing prisoners. The Hamas-led militants holding Corporal Gilad Shalit had said if Israel had not begun releasing some of the 1 500 prisoners by 6am on Tuesday it would ”bear the consequences”.
Western Cape road users will soon have to pay a provincial fuel tax of between 10 and 50 cents a litre in addition to the current national levy, the media reports said on Wednesday. The money raised through the levy would be used to pay for the rehabilitation and upgrading of transport infrastructure and to develop a high quality public transport system.
Uganda has offered a ”total amnesty” to the rebel warlord Joseph Kony, who was indicted by the international criminal court last year for crimes against humanity. The government offered the amnesty in exchange for Kony abandoning the civil war he has waged for the past 19 years, in which his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has slaughtered civilians and abducted thousands of children.
The United Nations Security Council was expected to meet on Wednesday to try to craft a response to the provocative firing of up to six missiles by the North Korean regime. Tuesday’s launch was intended to cause maximum irritation to Washington — timed within minutes of the launch of the shuttle Discovery on Independence Day.
Nasa called it ”a gift to the nation”. On Tuesday the shuttle Discovery finally blasted off after several days of delays to lend a spectacular fiery flourish to the United States’s Independence Day celebrations. ”I can’t think of a better place to be on the Fourth of July,” said Steve Lindsey, the shuttle commander, moments before Discovery roared into a clear Florida sky.