Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has withdrawn from the third South African Aids Conference after apparently being sidelined by the conference’s organisers, it emerged on Tuesday. Speaking at the official opening, the South African Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said: ”The minister has withdrawn because of the place you have allocated to her.”
Canada has denied a visa to South African anti-apartheid leader Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was to be the keynote speaker at a fund-raising gala in Toronto on Tuesday, featuring an opera about her life. Immigration officials in Ottawa were not immediately available to comment.
South African miners and municipal workers on Tuesday threatened to join an escalating strike by civil servants that has disrupted services at hospitals and schools, state media reported. The National Union of Mineworkers said it was consulting its 280Â 000 members on possible strike action, a move that could hurt one of the biggest sectors of the economy.
Internet culture, often portrayed as the vanguard of progress, is actually a jungle peopled by intellectual yahoos and digital thieves, according to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-dissenter. Andrew Keen, a 47-year-old Briton who founded dot-com era music start-up audiocafe.com, argues that basic notions of expertise are under assault amid a cultural shift in favour of the amateurism of blogs.
While well-resourced newspapers in the developed world are embarking on projects to merge their print and online operations into a single, sleek news machine, their colleagues in African and other developing countries are nowhere near such convergence, battling a lack of resources and tough media laws.
Former AMLive host John Perlman has joined Johannesburg radio station KAYA FM and will present his first show “Today with John Perlman” between 6pm and 7pm on Monday. His first guest is businessman Tokyo Sexwale who has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate.
The newspaper business is growing despite pressure from online, Timothy Balding, chief executive officer of the World Association of Newspapers, told delegates at the World Newspaper Congress in Cape Town.
Nearly 80 percent of the world’s editors and senior newsroom managers view online journalism as a ”welcome addition”, according to the 2006 Newsroom Barometre released at the World Newspaper Congress.
The first time bank executive Lee Meyer strayed into South Africa’s rough Alexandra township, he spent a nervous half hour trying to get out without being attacked by local gangsters. Several years later, apartheid is over, Alexandra is safer, and Meyer is back.
Atop Greenland’s Suicide Cliff, from where old Inuit women used to hurl themselves when they felt they had become a burden to their community, a crack and a thud like thunder pierce the air. ”We don’t have thunder here. But I know it from movies,” says Ilulissat nurse Vilhelmina Nathanielsen, who hiked with us through the melting snow.