Aborigines on Tuesday said the government was trying to steal their land under the guise of responding to a crisis that Prime Minister John Howard has labelled Australia’s own Hurricane Katrina. Canberra began deploying police and soldiers to the Northern Territory outback this week under a controversial plan to combat widespread child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities.
A growing number of investors are choosing to take their activities online in a move to better manage their assets by having an electronic record of their transactions and investments. It’s fast, cheap and efficient. And it’s a fact not lost on asset management firms. Established in 1974, Allan Gray claims it is the largest privately owned investment management company in Southern Africa.
While the term asset management broadly refers to investment markets, a growing number of executives are applying its principles internally to their own organisations to cut costs, improve efficiency and generally contribute to good corporate governance. A Johannesburg analyst says this can be a complex process, but to accurately report to investors, asset management within an organiÂÂsation has to be tightly monitored.
It is time to switch capital from the retail and bank sectors, where the risks are predominantly on the downside, to the resources sector, where investors are expecting the worst and where, increasingly, it does not look as if the worst is upon them. That’s according to Chris Freund, portfolio manager at Investec Asset Management.
Intelligent investing means knowing what drives key markets. The latest (June) RMB Asset Management Summary says South Africa’s civil service strike has crippled state institutions and may cost the economy billions of rands, while the impact of higher wages could push up inflation and interest rates.
Zhou Fenying is a living witness to the dark history that still poisons China’s relations with Japan more than 60 years after World War II. When Zhou was 22, Japanese soldiers came to her village in eastern China, grabbed her and her sister-in-law and carted them off to a military brothel, she says.
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Roger Federer, bidding for a fifth successive Wimbledon title, eased into the second round on Monday but Swiss compatriot Martina Hingis was given an almighty fright by a player ranked 233 in the world. Federer returned to a much-changed and uncovered Centre Court, which had been drenched in traditional, heavy Wimbledon rain.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi on Monday condemned the working of the African Union and called for the creation of a ”United States of Africa” at the forthcoming AU summit in Ghana. ”The OAU [Organisation of African Unity, predecessor of the AU] failed, the council of African ministers failed, the African Parliament is a rump Parliament,” he said.
A Somali government soldier opened fire on Monday at a crowd clamouring for food aid in Mogadishu and killed at least three people, witnesses said. Three others were seriously wounded when the soldier fired in an apparent attempt to disperse a multitude trying to barge into a local authority building.