United Kingdom high street bank Barclays surprised the City of London last week by announcing an audacious tie-up with the Chinese government to boost its bid for ABN Amro. Barclays tabled a â,¬67,5billion improved cash-and-shares offer for the Dutch bank after it won a pledge from the state-run China Development Bank (CDB) to inject â,¬10,4billion into the merger, should it go ahead.
Said Alkhateeb, manager of the Strategic Studies Centre in Khartoum and a former general secretary of foreign relations for the ruling Sudanese National Congress party, travelled to Pretoria recently. He spoke to the Mail & Guardian about South Africa as a possible host and mediator in new talks between the Sudanese government and those Darfur rebel groups that refused to sign the Darfur Peace Agreement.
Environmentalists are up in arms about who should be responsible for ensuring the mining industry cleans up its act as Eskom fast-tracks its coal-fired power plans. Eskom has announced its intention to double electricity output in the next 20 years and the department of minerals and energy is the main player and referee in issuing and policing coal-mining permits.
Take five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who are working in an ill-equipped hospital. Accuse them wrongly of infecting 426 children with HIV-contaminated blood. Then lock them up for eight years, torture confessions out of them and sentence them to death, and you end up with a full partnership deal with the European Union.
It must rank among the greatest compliments the late Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, ever received. A court in Chicago recently heard Frank Calabrese Sr commend the description in the novel of a mafia initiation ceremony as ”very close” to the truth. Coming from Calabrese, that was high praise indeed. He is alleged to be a head of one of Chicago’s most notorious crime syndicates, the Outfit.
The Mail & Guardian‘s latest ”exposé” of ostensibly malevolent higher education management (”Education under the axe”, July 13) — this time aimed at Unisa’s academic restructuring — cannot go unchallenged. Unisa wishes to set the record straight and foster a more nuanced and insightful debate on the restructuring of higher education, writes Narend Baijnath.
You wouldn’t know it if you visited Barry Aaron’s Sandton law offices, but South African courts have been setting some fine precedents on how press freedom functions within the carefully poised architecture of the Bill of Rights. Nevertheless, Aaron’s clients pay to keep him in the tawdry pastiche of Nelson Mandela Square, writes Nic Dawes.
Spaniard Alberto Contador won the drug-tainted Tour de France in Paris on Sunday when he held on to his 23-second overnight lead on Australia’s Cadel Evans to secure the race’s fabled yellow jersey. Contador becomes the first Spaniard to win the three-week race since Miguel Indurain from 1991 to 1995.
Soon after I started working at the SABC in 2002, I was asked to chair a panel to hear the appeal of a Limpopo reporter who had been dismissed for "bringing the SABC into disrepute". The man had killed his wife. He was appealing his dismissal because, as he said, it was his own wife and he had done it "on his own time" — he had been on leave. We rejected his appeal, and later the courts sentenced him to a lengthy jail term.
More than a half-century after he finished the requirements to earn the rank, an 88-year-old man was honored as an Eagle Scout, making him possibly the oldest person yet to collect the Boy Scout honour. Walter Hart could not become an Eagle Scout at the time he earned the rank because his service in World War II got in the way.