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/ 25 September 2007
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clashed with an United States university president who called him a ”petty and cruel dictator” at a forum on Monday where Ahmadinejad criticised Israel and the US and said Iran was a peaceful nation. Ahmadinejad also said in an appearance at Columbia University that Iran’s nuclear programme was purely peaceful.
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/ 25 September 2007
”In the light of the brouhaha about the nominations to the South African Broadcasting Corporation board, I’d like to ask a question: Are some South Africans eligible to nominate and be nominated to lead public institutions while others should rather be ignored?” writes Prince Mashele.
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/ 25 September 2007
A small inedible seed from a Mexican tree is seen by some as the answer to the world’s fuel crisis. But the seed from the jatropha tree, used to make biofuels, is still hugely controversial in South Africa and the government is not at all sure that the plant will solve the country’s biofuel woes.
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/ 25 September 2007
The European Commission got the green light from Europe’s second-highest court last week to pursue even more high-profile antitrust actions against dominant global companies. The court upheld the commission’s decision that the software group had also abused its dominance by illegally "bundling" its Media Player software into Windows.
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/ 25 September 2007
Sithabile Khuzwayo is one of many women who bring groceries and clothing from across the borders of neighbouring Botswana and South Africa to sell at the flourishing flea markets of Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, Bulawayo. She said the hostility of Botswana’s locals to Zimbabwean traders has made buying wares in Botswana risky.
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/ 25 September 2007
Terry Crawford-Browne has done something incredible. He has spent R5-million on a battle from which he stands to make nothing: his campaign to expose corruption in South Africa’s multibillion-rand arms deal. Not many people can understand this in an era of greed and opportunism.
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/ 25 September 2007
In the first seven months of this year Africa saw $8,2-billion of new listings, already 13% higher than last year. Moreover, Nigeria, not South Africa, was the largest recipient of inflows for new listings. Africa has seen foreign investment inflows triple in the past decade from $10-billion to $30-billion a year.
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/ 25 September 2007
You might have expected Northern Rock to sound apologetic as queues formed outside its branches and its website was overwhelmed. Here is a bank that lent aggressively and tried to grab a big share of the mortgage market. Now its business model has been exposed as fragile and its brand damaged, perhaps beyond repair.
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/ 25 September 2007
The Federal Reserve, the United States’s central bank, slashed interest rates in a dramatic move designed to prevent the ailing US economy falling into recession. Abandoning its previous hard-line stance against inflation, the Fed cut by half a point both its federal funds rate — the nearest equivalent to the United Kingdom’s base rate — and the discount rate at which banks lend to each other.
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/ 25 September 2007
Asked in Tehran earlier this year about the possibility of a United States military strike on Iran, a senior official laughed. "Are you serious?" he asked. "They will never attack us. That would be madness." His amusement was genuine — and chilling. Ignorance and complacency about US motivations and intentions abound in equal measure in the land of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.