The medical fraternity is up in arms over the Discovery Health Network — they call it "unethical" and an attempt by a dominant player to control their practices. Discovery says it is cutting the rate of medical inflation. This year, Discovery introduced a direct payment plan for general practitioners and specialists who sign up to their network.
It is already the world’s biggest country, spanning 11 time zones and stretching from Europe to the Far East. But this week Russia signalled its intention to get even bigger by announcing an audacious plan to annex a vast, 1,19-million-square-kilometre chunk of the frozen and ice-encrusted Arctic.
Positions are being staked out concerning the establishment of a pan-African government, at the annual summit of the African Union under way in Accra. Heads of state and government from around the continent began meeting in the Ghanaian capital on Sunday; they will wrap up talks on Tuesday.
South Africa’s fledgling black economic empowerment (BEE) verification industry is being allowed to write the rules of BEE verification in its own favour, resulting in a closed shop of agents that benefit from keeping the costs of verification high, says Kevin Lester, owner of BEE consultancy Mohlaleng Transcend.
In many respects, Michael Moore’s new documentary movie, Sicko, is like a trial for those who oversee healthcare in the United States. The industry — doctors, drug makers, hospitals and insurers — is charged with greed and putting personal interests above those of patients. But one aspect missing from the film is the defence.
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has come a long way in the past six years. But even the crew who have filmed him for so long were apprehensive about his first on-screen kiss. ”I shouldn’t be watching this,” said producer David Heyman, describing his thoughts during the kiss scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Since Russia enshrined freedom of speech as a constitutional right in 1993, a total of 152 journalists have been murdered there. A database set up in June by two media monitoring organisations, the Glasnost Defence Foundation and the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, sets out the details of each case. Yelena Tregubova is trying hard not to be the 153rd.
They tussled with each other even to the end. Through the extraordinary unfolding hours of Wednesday’s handover, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seemed to be locked in the final spasm of their 13-year duel, each jockeying with the other for prominence. How would this day be cast — as Blair’s last, or Brown’s first?
Tony Blair is to make his first working visit to Ramallah on the West Bank in July as a special envoy of the quartet of Middle East peacemakers to discuss Palestinian state-building, it emerged last week after he was confirmed in the high-risk job amid scepticism about his chances of success.
Why does Ronald Suresh Roberts keep scrabbling long-buried controversies to the surface? Recently, he recycled President Thabo Mbeki’s 2002 Briefing Notes by arguing that the Congress of South African Trade Unions is the counter-revolutionary stooge of the right. His new book, Fit to Govern, peels back the ”stiff dishonoured shroud” of Barney Pityana’s 2000 media racism inquiry.