British artist who last week ate a meal of meatballs made from a dead corgi dog in a protest against animal cruelty said on Sunday his next project involved being buried in a box under a mountain of mashed potato. Performance artist Mark McGowan (37) said the corgi, which died from natural causes, tasted terrible.
A Somali Islamist group on Monday claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that targeted the Horn of Africa country’s prime minister. Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi has accused al-Qaeda of being behind Sunday’s suicide bombing that killed seven people outside his home in Mogadishu.
The trial of Charles Taylor — the former president of Liberia and the first former African leader to face an international court — opens in The Hague on Monday where he is accused of war crimes during the diamond-fuelled conflict in neighbouring Sierra Leone. The prosecutor will open the trial, which is expected to last for a year, by detailing 11 war crimes charges against Taylor.
Deutsche Telekom is investing $20-million in hotly tipped internet telephony start-up Jajah.com as the online communications industry continues its rapid growth. Jajah has already been backed by venture groups such as Sequoia Capital — the Silicon Valley company that was instrumental in the rise of Google, YouTube and PayPal — and Intel.
Now that the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Codes have taken over the job of encouraging companies to implement affirmative action, the Employment Equity Act should be scrapped. With it should go the Commission for Employment Equity.
I must say that I am gobsmacked by the responses in these pages to a couple of observations I made in this column relating to the new Chinatown in Cyrildene, east Johannesburg. On reflection, I must have been losing it. I was guilty of becoming complacent, and writing as if regular readers were fully aware of my irreverent style. Bad mistake.
In a circular to its stakeholders, the organisation’s executive officers, Dorothy Brislin and Tsikani Mthembu, wrote: "Unless a rescue injection of funds occurs within the next few days, the board’s decision to liquidate FRU will proceed." By Tuesday, the pair had already made a desperate plea to Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan for urgent intervention to prevent liquidation.
At first glance Robert Zoellick, who George Bush nominated to be the next president of the World Bank, could not be more different than his predecessor, Paul Wolfowitz. While both men have been at the heart of Republican-dominated Washington for many years, with careers stretching back into the term of the current President Bush’s father, the two have widely differing personalities.
The scrap has well and truly begun for the precious subscription broadcasting licences that the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) intends to issue. This week saw the launch of public hearings held by the regulator, which will allow it to whittle down the 18 applicants to those deserved few, who will be given an opportunity to make their fortune in the billion-rand pay-TV industry.
Continuity has always been the name of the game in Nigerian politics and this time is no different. The outgoing president, Olusegun Obasanjo, made much of the fact that he oversaw the first civilian-to-civilian transition in the nation’s history, but what does this amount to?