A mid all the hoopla surrounding the 60th anniversary of Indian independence, almost nothing has been heard from Pakistan, which also turned 60 recently. Nothing, that is, if you discount the low rumble of suicide bombings, the noise of automatic weapons storming the Red Mosque and the creak of slowly collapsing dictatorships.
While everyone’s attention has been focused on the trials and tribulations of the life insurance sector, Sanlam has been quietly transforming itself into a diversified financial services company, focusing on home loans and money market accounts rather than life cover.
BEE, despite its redistributive intentions, has been doubly conducive to the interests of large-scale South African capital, says a new academic paper. It has largely served to entrench established interests, especially in the industrial fishing industry, with a few high-profile black partners receiving some of the cut while the risk is outsourced to black capital.
Government has negotiated special, cut-rate deals through Telkom for large foreign investors in South Africa’s business process outsourcing sector. However, these special deals are only for new entrants to the sector and current industry players are upset that the red carpet is being rolled out for new entrants, while they are being ignored.
When Mrs Akinyi filed for divorce in Kenya after her husband tried to kill her, she had to borrow money to pay her legal fees. ”I have already spent KS35Â 000 [],” Akinyi says. She tried to get legal aid, she says, but was told there were many cases that were more urgent than hers. ”
For Americans sitting in cinemas watching the summer’s fun movies, such as The Simpsons and Hairspray, the trailer for Lions for Lambs is jarring and unexpected. It opens with a moody shot of the Washington Memorial, and shifts to a series of quick-fire scenes about President George W Bush’s ”war on terror”.
The Vatican may have territorial limits, its own post office and even a football tournament, but it has hitherto lacked what all real states offer: an airline. That will be put right this month as the Vatican launches its first charter flights for pilgrims from Rome to Lourdes, with some of the world’s top religious destinations to follow, including the shrine of Fatima in Portugal and the shrine of the Madonna of Guadalupe in Mexico.
When Katrin Himmler was 15, a classmate at her Berlin school asked her during a history lesson if she was related to Heinrich Himmler, the feared head of Hitler’s SS and a key architect of the Holocaust. When she told them that he was, in fact, her great-uncle, the whole class fell silent and the teacher carried on as if nothing had been said.
In one of the largest deals of the web 2.0 era, the Walt Disney Company recently agreed to pay as much as -million to buy Club Penguin, a ”virtual world” for children between the ages of six and 14. When kids join Club Penguin, they adopt an animated penguin as their online alter ego, or avatar.
For the retired businessman bored with zero gravity flights, heli- skiing, flying ex-military Russian Mig fighter jets and swimming with sharks, climbing Everest can be the perfect next date on the adventure calendar. But research on more than 2 000 expeditions to the world’s highest peak has shown that older climbers are more likely to fail and more likely to die on the mountain.