South African life insurer Metropolitan Holdings increased annual headline earnings per share by 28% and said on Wednesday the outlook for its target markets remained positive. Shares in Metropolitan outperformed rivals as South Africa’s bourse fell 3% in a fresh sell-off sparked by emerging market worries.
United States President George Bush wrapped up a tour of Latin America on Wednesday with little to show for his six-day swing through the region. Bush was due to head home with no substantive deals or immediate evidence that the public relations offensive had salvaged Washington’s reputation in the five countries he visited.
South Africa’s relatively small space programme can still play a significant role in skills development, Professor Sias Mostert of SunSpace and Information Systems in Stellenbosch said on Wednesday. It was a myth that satellite programmes belonged only to larger nations, he said.
Late on Monday Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama went head to head for a key demographic group: Jewish voters. Supporters from the Clinton and Obama camps flooded the hallways of the Washington Convention Centre, distributing fliers and shouting through loudhailers in their bid to draw people in.
The Hamas-run Palestinian government said on Tuesday that it was working to release Alan Johnston, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Gaza correspondent, saying that it knew who was responsible for his kidnapping. ”This issue is on its way to being solved, God willing,” said Ghazi Hamad, a government spokesperson.
The White House on Tuesday rejected calls by Congress for its senior staff to give evidence in the growing row over the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors. Congress is demanding that Karl Rove, George Bush’s chief political adviser, and others appear before an investigation into allegations that the eight were dismissed on political grounds.
The crisis in the United States sub-prime mortgage market was the hot topic on the JSE just after midday on Wednesday as the local bourse, together with its global counterparts, followed Wall Street south. With commodities also taking strain, the local bourse was hit by a double whammy.
Dell’s latest launch has really taken off. Unfortunately for Dell’s crumbling profitability, it’s a website called IdeaStorm, not a new PC. IdeaStorm is designed to get ideas and feedback from Dell users, and the mechanism is much the same as Digg: people make suggestions and everybody votes for the ones they like best.
Proudly South African investment in domestic equities is a paying proposition by a huge margin. The trouble is, not enough South Africans think so and consistently lose out — never more so than in the past three years. In the first eight weeks of 2007 alone, foreigners accumulated a net R20-billion in South African shares.
The scene is a Starbucks in Regent Street, London. Two 23-year-old women from Trinity College, Dublin, are doing a five-minute pitch from a laptop to a couple of serious venture capitalists. It is the cappuccino version of TV programmes such as <i>Dragons’ Den</i> and it is telling us a lot about the vitality of the new internet start-up boom in the United Kingdom.