When the Cabinet is handed the final version of the department of trade and industry’s Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Codes, small business will be watching to see how government intends to regulate them. Governments have always been keen to regulate business. But one would struggle to find an intervention more subtle, far-reaching and — here’s the rub — more complicated than the BEE codes.
It’s 10am on a stiflingly hot Monday morning and I am in a delivery room with one of the unluckiest mothers on the planet. She is Dahara Laouali, and at the moment she is lying on a narrow, dusty hospital trolley pushing her baby into the world. Although the birth is imminent, Dahara is making no noise at all. This is Niger, where the tradition is that mothers labour in silence.
Samantha Galliet is best known as "that woman who took on Discovery". Diagnosed with breast cancer at 29, Galliet faced a woman’s worst nightmare. She had a particularly aggressive strain of breast cancer called Her2. Fortunately for Galliet there had been a breakthrough in drug therapy for this type of cancer and her chances of survival were dramatically increased by the availability of a new drug called Herceptin.
Former Zambian first lady Vera Tembo (formerly Chiluba) showed her resilience in last week’s general elections, winning a parliamentary seat for the Movement for Multi Party Democracy (MMD). She is the first woman to hold that seat, located in the heartland of the United National Independence Party opposition stronghold.
If it can reasonably be defined as a political philosophy or rhetorical brand that sticks up for the common person against the elite, why is it that “populism” is so widely denigrated? When American liberals speak of Hugo Chávez as a populist, it is not a term of endearment.
The traffic department, in its wisdom, has decided to solve the problem of congestion on the N1 corridor between the crucial Gauteng centres of Johannesburg and Tshwane (still known to most people as Pretoria) by turning the former speed freak outside lane into an exclusive lane for vehicles with more than one passenger.
As peace talks between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) continue, a debate is raging over whether those who have committed war crimes should be allowed to escape international justice for the sake of peace. The LRA is insisting as its condition for full peace talks that the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, drop arrest warrants against its leaders on 33 charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Venezuela’s campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council is reaching a climax in the face of fierce resistance from the Bush administration. Hugo Chávez has invested billions of dollars and a year of globetrotting in cementing his position as a global player.
While President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is busy running a high-voltage campaign against the United States and its policies, back home citizens are wondering if he will ever make good on an election promise to crack down on the corrupt and distribute Iran’s vast oil revenues more equitably.
Worldwide spending on weapons is expected to reach record levels this year at a time when the arms industry is increasingly able to avoid export controls, human rights and aid agencies say in a report published on Monday. By the end of the year, military spending is estimated to reach ,058-billion, about 15 times the amount spent on international aid.