African National Congress (ANC) MPs who are part of the Southern African Development Community observer mission to the parliamentary and presidential elections in Zimbabwe will have more freedom than before to give their honest assessment of the situation in that country.
United States airlines must pay for their pollution or face a curb on flights to the European Union, the EU transport commissioner warned last week. Jacques Barrot issued the ultimatum in the month that limits on flights between the EU and US are lifted, the biggest shake-up in the transatlantic airline market for 30 years.
The collapse and fire sale of Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest United States investment bank, might seem bad news, but it is actually good. The excesses of Wall Street firms in recent years were so egregious that a shake-out simply had to happen. It would have been a travesty — and rather surreal — if we had had to wait much longer.
First came Betty Grable’s legs, Dolly Parton’s chest and Keith Richards’s hands. Now a Dutch winemaker has set a new standard for the insurance of strange body parts by taking out a £3,9-million policy on his nose. Ilja Gort, a Dutch musician, prides himself on his range of wines and clarets.
Governments shielding their national-flag airlines are "killing" the aviation industry, the head of the International Air Transport Association (Iata) has warned. Giovanni Bisignani, chief executive of Iata, warned that protectionist attitudes towards flag carriers were exacerbating the current downturn in the industry.
Officials in Amsterdam are considering plans to build a vast underground city beneath the city’s famous canals to house car parks, cinemas and sports halls. Engineers and architects has submitted proposals for a network of underground tunnels to provide up to six million square metres of new space in the historic centre.
For five centuries Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper has stood majestically still on the walls of a Milanese friary’s dining hall, the only disturbance the slow flaking of its priceless paint. Now British filmmaker Peter Greenaway has been granted permission to bring to life the hidden stories he sees in the wall painting.
Zimbabwe’s crisis has created paradoxes such as poor billionaires, the fastest-shrinking economy outside a war zone and other such clichéd oddities. Its citizens have sharpened their great survival tool: humour. Amid the gloom, Zimbabweans have shown themselves to be self-effacing and funny.
The plane door opened and the elderly visitors, all visually impaired and in some cases blind, shuffled out slowly and carefully into Venezuela. Disease, age and poverty had stolen their eyesight, but now they were in the land of Hugo Chávez and that was about to change.
To combat flailing literacy and numeracy rates, the government will introduce national tests at primary schools. A study has shown that South African children are the worst performers in literacy and mathematics. Learners in grades R to six will be the first batch to benefit from the roll-out of the new tests.