Street demonstrations alone are unlikely to bring down Burma’s ruthless military junta. They have been tried before, notably in 1988, when about 3Â 000 civilians reportedly died in the resulting crackdown. Nor will any amount of huffing and puffing by Gordon Brown and other Western leaders have much impact, especially if (as in the past) it is unsupported by concrete, punitive measures.
The fierce morning heat was a memory. The afternoon haze had come and gone. It was the cool of dusk, with shadows stretching as the sun dipped below the Andes. And Hugo Chávez was still talking. The clock showed it was just after 7pm. The Venezuelan president had started at 11am, more than eight hours earlier — a new record.
A wakening giant is threatening to turn South Africa’s private health industry upside down. The Government Employees Medical Scheme (Gems) has seen sensational growth, which has taken it from little more than a pipe dream to South Africa’s third-largest medical scheme in just three years.
It was a case of David meeting Goliath at the Land Claims Court in Cape Town’s High Court this week. The court sat to ratify a settlement agreement signed between the Richtersveld community and the government, one which Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin has called a breakthrough.
Going home … going home … am a-going home … The lovely words of Aaron Neville’s song ring in my head for a whole fortnight before my three-week vacation in Zimbabwe. Each day I wake up and pump up the volume. I am so excited, I can’t wait. I haven’t been home for more than five months. This is long overdue, writes Everjoice Win.
The town of Pomfret will be razed to the ground by December despite a recent assessment by the national department of public works showing that it could be developed into a fully fledged local authority. Bob Namusi, a councillor at the Molopo Local Municipality, under which the town falls, says the national public works department had mistakenly given residents of Pomfret the impression that the asbestos-polluted town could be rehabilitated without its residents moving.
After several false starts, the SABC is finally going to broadcast Unauthorised: Thabo Mbeki, the documentary that it canned 16 months ago “for being incurably defamatory”. The screening, which according to the SABC’s online schedule, will be shown on SABC3 on October 3 at 9.30pm, comes after the documentary had been screened as part of several film festivals in the country.
Painting a swastika on a public building is a hate crime. But what happens when the building itself is the swastika? While appearing innocuous from the ground, the striking shape of a construction in San Diego, now on view to internet users accessing Google Earth, is unmistakable — it resembles the Nazi symbol.
After the heady excitement of last year’s pro-democracy uprising in Nepal that forced King Gyanendra to restore Parliament, Nepal’s eight-party coalition has fallen apart with the Maoists quitting the government. The move did not come as a surprise, as the ex-guerrillas had been warning of this for months. But it does put the fate of elections for the constituent assembly, scheduled for November 22, in real doubt.
The Oprah Winfrey Show is about as compelling and gruesome as road kill: no matter how much it grosses you out, you just can’t help looking. A particularly bloody lump of matter recently made it on to our small screens, courtesy of the queen of talk shows, in the shape of a posse of smug self-help gurus whose brand of snake oil has seduced millions the world over. Yes, it’s The Secret.