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/ 17 September 2007
Heavy monsoon rain hampered the retrieval of five bodies trapped in the wreckage of a budget airliner that crashed while trying to land on the Thai resort island of Phuket, killing 88 people. The Indonesian captain and his Thai co-pilot were both killed, but 42 people survived the crash.
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/ 17 September 2007
The former commander of the failed United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda on Sunday warned the newly appointed head of a similar force in Darfur that he faced ”long odds” against success and predicted he would be betrayed by the very officials and governments meant to be backing the mission.
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/ 17 September 2007
At a checkpoint leading on to the airport highway in west Baghdad this week, a policeman blocked the traffic. Dressed in a blue-checked uniform, Kevlar helmet, a Kalashnikov slung on his shoulder and a whistle in his hand, the last button of his uniform was missing, exposing a hairy stomach that hung over his military belt.
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/ 17 September 2007
Daniel Hailu promised to marry his girlfriend after the millennium. And now she eagerly awaits the arrival of her wedding ring. "She is so relieved that 1999 is nearly over," said Hailu, a 29-year-old television salesperson. Hailu is not living in a time warp, but rather in Ethiopia where, thanks to a quirk of history, the country’s calendar lags more than seven years behind the Western version.
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/ 17 September 2007
Sasol’s R18-billion BEE transaction, announced this week, is another step in the toenadering between the synthetic fuel and chemicals producer and government. This is the biggest BEE transaction (until the next one comes along). It marks a new stage of atonement for Sasol’s remark in its statutory filings for the New York Stock Exchange that BEE was a "risk".
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/ 17 September 2007
Although I work as an economist and portfolio manager in the finance sector, I live in a remote rural area where my husband has, together with the local community, built a backpackers’ lodge. This is in the most remote village in the poorest district in South Africa (according to Statistics SA), writes Rejane Woodroffe.
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/ 17 September 2007
Even if most employed South Africans paid up to 15% of their salaries towards the new national social security system (NSSS), netting a whopping R54-billion, it would fall short of current flows into the pension fund industry by R18-billion. The problem with pension funds is not so much coverage of employed people, but rather that people are drawing on these savings before retirement.
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/ 17 September 2007
South Africa’s decision to invest in a nuclear power future has raised concerns about what will happen to the nuke waste generated. Last week it emerged that nuclear power would account for about half of Eskom’s planned new generating capacity. At present South Africa’s nuclear waste policy is vague and does not list a clear end-plan of what will happen to high-level nuclear waste.
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/ 17 September 2007
When Ahmed Mursal was held up by a drug-desperate gunman in the tuckshop where he was working in the Cape Flats township of Delft, he offered to buy the gun for R250. He told the gunman he could pay only R30 then, but would speak to his Somali brothers, one of whom was sure to want to buy the gun. If the gunman brought the gun the next day, Mursal would pay the balance of R220. The gunman accepted.
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/ 17 September 2007
Dame Anita Roddick, who has died aged 64 after a brain haemorrhage, opened her first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. The year is important. The beauty business was not then about bodies, which were merely the soaped tail end of the face and hair market, its lotions laboratory tested, industrially concocted and sold through chemists’ chains or the phoney salons of department stores.