After a tough day of deal-making, it is only right that the king of Wall Street should retire home to a palace. Stephen Schwarzman does just that — his Manhattan apartment boasts 35 rooms including a foyer the size of a ballroom, his-and-hers saunas, a pine-panelled library and 13 bathrooms. Works by Claude Monet adorn the walls of the two-floor Park Avenue residence.
An ambitious plan by the department of labour to create a massive database of all job vacancies in South Africa is being backed by official small business bodies, which raises serious questions about the state of small-business advocacy in the country. For several weeks, no media picked up on the strange plan after Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana announced it in his budget vote speech in Parliament.
After the inflation target was breached, the Reserve Bank was widely seen as justified in increasing interest rates early in June for the fifth time in a year. The question is less whether it should have done so, but whether we have chosen the correct inflation target.
Betty was nine when her mother told her she would have to leave Nigeria and live with a family friend in the United Kingdom. The girl was sad to leave her five sisters and two brothers, but the family was poor, living in one room, taking turns to sleep on the only bed. In Britain, it seemed, Betty’s life would at least be easier. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Another week of hearings at the banking inquiry of the Competition Commission; another bonanza for the lawyers. All the banks seem to have lawyers present at all the hearings, madly taking notes and looking very serious. The debate can degenerate into mind-numbing legalese, which is no doubt important in determining the legal framework of anti-competitive behaviour, writes Maya Fisher-French.
Politically motivated shootings targeting government ministers and senior ruling-party officials continued to wreak havoc in the Lesotho capital, Maseru, this week. The most recent wave of attacks started on June 10, when armed men attacked bodyguards at three government ministers’ homes. Several days later opposition leader Tom Thabane’s house was attacked.
George W Bush (approval rating: 29%) is used to being unpopular with the US electorate. But now he is even losing the support of the rightwingers in his party — and they’re showing their displeasure in dollars, not just percentage points. In the run-up to the last two American election campaigns, eager Republicans lined their party’s coffers by paying up to $25 000 to have the president pose for a picture with them at fundraising events.
Globalisation has reduced the bargaining power of unskilled workers and pushed up inequality in many Western countries, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said this week, urging governments to improve their social safety nets. The Paris-based rich nations club said in its annual Employment Outlook that the prospect of offshoring was likely to have increased the vulnerability of jobs.
Male, about 40, gaffer tape over his eyes, tortured, strangled, shot twice, and dumped on a patch of wasteland — and wrapped in Christmas paper. Without the yuletide motif the unidentified corpse would have been just another statistic. As it was, the extra detail earned him a brief mention in the nightly news roundup.
A restricted United Nations report says the human-rights situation in the Western Sahara is of serious concern. The report, released this week by the office of the UN’s high commission for human rights, says ”the Saharawi people are not only denied their right to self-determination, but … severely restricted from exercising a series of other rights …