A suicide bomber wearing a burqa set off explosives in the north-western Pakistani town of Bannu on Monday killing up to 15 people, including four policemen, security officials said. The blast was the lastest in a wave of attacks, most in the north-west of the country near the border with Afghanistan.
The Democratic Alliance is to ask President Thabo Mbeki questions in Parliament relating to National Prosecuting Authority head Vusi Pikoli’s suspension and the reported warrant of arrest issued for police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi. The party’s parliamentary leader Sandra Botha said it was "imperative that the president informs the nation".
The CBD of Athlone, Cape Town, has become the first previously disadvantaged area in South Africa to be declared a City Improvement District (CID), a concept that has worked wonders in turning around parts of the CBDs of Cape Town and Johannesburg. But can it work in smaller areas, driven by local owner-managers, as opposed to large corporations?
It is no longer a rainforest but a tree cemetery. As far as the eye can see there are uprooted, bare and broken trunks. The canopy, a roof of foliage so lush you could walk over it, is gone. The few remaining bits of green are no bigger than broccoli. This is the aftermath of Hurricane Felix along Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast. A smell of decay shrouds the landscape.
Prosperity has come at a price in Belgium. As affluence has grown, so has the country’s waste mountain — a problem that all governments are finding increasingly hard to ignore. But, the region of Flanders in Belgium claims to have found a solution, and the world’s waste authorities are beating a path to its door.
Columnists should generally resist the temptation to write about themselves. Unless purely comic, the column that begins "I want to tell you about my awful experience on the Guava Fruit Airline the other day" is a self-indulgent expropriation of a public space. But writing about the organisation that one has been employed by for 12 years is I hope forgiveable, especially if it seeks to make a broader point.
There has been much interest recently in mine-contaminated water, with media reports highlighting the issue and concern mounting that environmental and health risks are not being managed effectively. Africa’s variable and unreliable water resources have been a source of conflict for centuries.
Once upon a time there were two countries separated by an ocean. One was called China and its people worked long hours to produce cheap goods. The other was known as the United States. Once its people worked hard and it was the workshop of the world. But recently the US had not worked so hard and for every $100 of goods and services produced in its factories and offices, $106 was spent in its shopping malls.
Domestic workers now have an affordable and simple retirement savings plan that will make it easier for employers to provide for their workers’ retirement. The product launched by the Presidential Working Group on Women and Old Mutual forms part of a much larger initiative by PWGW to create a women’s retirement plan, writes Maya Fisher-French.
When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s combative president, provoked his latest controversy in New York this week by asserting that there were no homosexuals in his country, he may have been indulging in sophistry or just plain wishful thinking. While Ahmadinejad may want to believe that his Islamic society is exclusively non-gay, it is a belief undermined by the paradox that transsexuality and sex changes are tolerated and encouraged under Iran’s theocratic system.