When Betty Dukes became a check-out counter assistant at the world’s biggest supermarket company, it was for five dollars an hour and the chance of moving up through the company ranks. She got neither. Instead she got a starring role in an -billion legal battle that has earned her a reputation as the new Erin Brockovich.
Vice president Dick Cheney brought a long-running feud with leading Democrats over his former company, Halliburton, to a foul-mouthed climax on the floor of the Senate. Cheney told Vermont’s senator, Patrick Leahy to ”fuck yourself”, after he apparently approached George Bush’s number two for a chat.
A group of 29 Italian police officers, including the country’s anti-terror chief, go on trial in Genoa on Saturday in connection with a brutal attack on protesters at the 2001 G8 summit and an alleged plot to justify the violence using fabricated evidence.
South Africa’s oldest lesbian and gay service organisation, the Triangle Project, on Friday reacted with outrage at a website that called for the ”reclaiming of Cape Town from the homosexual plague”.
A humid strip of coastal rainforest in Australia’s far north, the world-heritage listed region has the highest number of endemic primitive plants in the world and may be the oldest rainforest. Now, an old row about housing development has been revived by the local authority’s decision to ban building on 450 privately owned plots.
Absa shareholders gave the go-ahead on Friday for a landmark deal that will see 10% of the banking group’s ownership directly held by black shareholders. Absa Group chief executive Nallie Bosman said the deal put Absa in line to meet the financial sector charter target of 10% direct ownership, but that it now has an overall ”indirect” black shareholding of about 25%.
Firearm owners will seek a court interdict on Wednesday to stop government from enacting legislation to control the ownership of guns. The South African Gunowners Association says the Firearms Control Act is a threat to the country’s security and its citizens.
The leaders of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda pulled their countries back from the brink of war on Friday when they agreed at a crisis summit in Nigeria to respect a peace accord signed in 2002. Kabila and Kagame held five hours of talks to try to defuse rising tensions between them.
Conflict in Africa came under the spotlight when the deputy presidents of South Africa and Cuba met for bilateral discussions in Pretoria. Deputy president Jacob Zuma says he briefed his Cuban counterpart Carlos Lage about initiatives to eradicate conflict on the continent, with particular reference to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sudan and the Ivory Coast.
At a local conference on The Eradication of Unfair Discrimination through Equality Courts this week, white South Africans rubbed shoulders with black South Africans in a way that would have been impossible in the past. But despite government’s efforts, South Africa remains a polarised society.