It is time once again for that touching annual ritual, in which the world’s most powerful people move themselves to tears. At Heiligendamm they will emote with the wretched of the earth. They will beat their breasts and say many worthy things — about climate change, Africa, poverty — but one word will not leave their lips. Power.
In 2005, at the Gleneagles G8 meeting, world leaders promised to increase annual aid levels by $50-billion by 2010, half of which would go to Africa. To meet this target, G8 governments would need to give just more than $1 per citizen per year. This is the equivalent of what Americans spend on nail polish each year; a quarter of what Canadians spend on video gaming.
It was billed as the day they would bring the eight most powerful nations to their knees by sitting in the road, but by 9am the idealists, anticapitalists and anarchists had already been forced to take a hike. James Foley (22), a student from Glasgow, Scotland, had risen at 7.15am at the tent city in Rostock to join thousands of anti-G8 demonstrators marching on the luxurious Baltic spa resort of Heiligendamm, where world leaders were gathering.
One of the most enduring clichés in the fashion world is that it is the details that make the difference. This particular detail measures 12cm by 10cm, but it has started what is turning out to be the biggest legal battle in the fashion industry. The back pocket of Levi’s jeans, decorated with two intersecting arcs and a simple cloth tag, has been, Levi’s contends, "shamelessly copied" by other denim brands.
The public hearings to select South Africa’s new Pay-TV operators claimed further casualties this week, with yet another applicant withdrawing and another breaking into tears under cross-examination. The hearings, held by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), were fraught with interested parties trying to cut others down to size.
Iran’s interior minister has challenged a social taboo by urging the revival of the ancient Shia practice of temporary marriage to give young people easier legitimate access to sex. Moustafa Pourmohammadi, the minister, said the tradition, known as sigheh, should be promoted to offset a trend towards later marriage, which he said was depriving Iran’s youth of sexual fulfilment.
Six days, 40 years ago. Looking back to the weeks preceding the war, it may be difficult for you to imagine just how desperate life seemed for Israelis, ringed by peoples whose armies pointed their weapons towards us, whose leaders daily promised the imminent destruction of our state and whose newspapers carried crude cartoons of Jews being kicked off the face of the earth.
Of the more than R30-billion in transaction fee income banks receive, about R2-billion comes from consumers using another bank’s ATM infrastructure. This will be a major focus of the Competition Commission report, together with interchange fees and improved access to the National Payment System, suggested a recent press briefing by the banking inquiry’s technical team.
Five men have been arrested in connection with a burglary at Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Soweto home, Johannesburg police said on Monday morning. Superintendent Thembi Nkwashu said Tutu’s house in Orlando West was broken into on Sunday morning.
When the Israeli leaders launched their expansionist war in June 1967 they never envisaged that 40 years later they would still be haunted by the consequences. At the time, they were driven by one strategic objective: to end the conflict by seizing all that remained of Palestine and complete the process of ethnic cleansing that started in 1948.