South African Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni said on Wednesday higher energy and food prices were leading to wider inflation, and again urged consumers to live ”within their means”. Monetary authorities had to guard against the second-round effects of rising prices, he said in a speech in the remote northern town of Haenertsburg.
Red-faced at explaining the name to visitors, a South African mayor is now pushing for a fresh title for one of country’s main municipalities, which translates as a pair of bull’s testicles. Obed Mlaba, mayor of Durban, wants eThekwini municipality to be included in a review of place names designed to honour heroes of the struggle against apartheid.
There is ”no hope” of finding survivors from a flood in a Chinese coal mine, which has trapped 181 workers, a senior official said on Thursday, adding those responsible for the disaster will be handed over to the law. The miners have been trapped since last Friday, when a river dyke burst during torrential rain.
A nine-year-old maths prodigy was on Thursday admitted to a Hong Kong university, telling reporters he struggled to communicate academically with his own age group. March Boedihardjo, an Indonesian-Chinese boy resident in Hong Kong, earlier this month gained two grade As and a B in his A-levels — normally taken by 18-year-olds.
Fernando Alonso is refreshed and ready to step up his championship challenge as Formula One heads to Turkey this weekend. The 26-year-old Spaniard has been relaxing on holiday since the pit-lane controversy in Hungary three weeks ago and he is in optimistic mood going into his 100th grand prix.
Springbok wing Akona Ndungane has been sent home from his team’s short tour of Ireland and Scotland for medical treatment, the South African Rugby Union announced on Thursday. Ndungane was injured in his team’s 18-3 victory over Connacht in Galway, Ireland, in a World Cup warm-up match on Tuesday.
Goalkeeper Paul Robinson’s place in the England squad was being questioned by the British press on Thursday after he gifted Germany an equaliser in a friendly at Wembley, which the visitors won 2-1. Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard put England ahead in the ninth minute but a bad mistake by Robinson gifted Schalke striker Kevin Kuranyi an equaliser in the 26th minute.
There will be no Munchkins skipping among the daisies, and the Yellow Brick Road will be updated with the latest computer technology in the Warner Brothers remake of one of the most popular films of all time. To the inevitable horror of the movie’s thousands of ardent fans, the producers have vowed to inject the story with a ”2007 wow factor”.
Eve Ensler has just returned from hell. That is how the author of The Vagina Monologues describes her trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where tens of thousands of women have been sexually attacked and mutilated in the African nation’s civil war.
Senegal’s movie business, home of some of the continent’s first black filmmakers, is in the throes of crisis with cinema theatres downing shutters as cheap and mostly pirated DVDs flood the markets. Many cinema halls have been turned into warehouses for anything from spare car parts to cheap Chinese trinkets hawked on the streets.