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/ 19 September 2006
South Africa’s yawning current-account deficit will remain the bugbear of the country’s economy, with figures on Thursday due to show the gap hovering near record levels in the second quarter of 2006. The Reserve Bank’s quarterly bulletin on Thursday will reveal whether there was any narrowing of the shortfall on the country’s broadest measure of trade.
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/ 19 September 2006
Veteran African National Congress (ANC) MP Ben Turok cut a lonely figure outside Parliament on Tuesday as opposition MPs seized on an invitation by HIV/Aids activists to participate in a ”people’s parliament” convened by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). ”I am here because I want to listen to the TAC. They are an international, well-known organisation,” said Turok.
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/ 19 September 2006
HIV/Aids is the biggest single killer of new mothers in South Africa, the Department of Health said on Tuesday in a grim new statistic of the pandemic’s toll on the country. The department released a study on maternal deaths from 2002 to 2004, illustrating a raft of problems with medical care for mothers in the country, which is both the richest in Africa and among the worst hit by the Aids crisis.
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/ 19 September 2006
Japan will move a step closer to electing its most nationalist leader in decades on Wednesday if, as expected, Shinzo Abe succeeds Junichiro Koizumi as leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic party. Abe, the chief Cabinet secretary, is widely seen as Koizumi’s heir-apparent and recent opinion polls give him a comfortable lead over his rivals.
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/ 19 September 2006
Hurricane Gordon strengthened as it bore down on Portugal’s Azores Islands on Tuesday and emergency services in the mid-Atlantic islands went on alert. Gordon bore winds of 160kph at 8am EDT (12am GMT), making it a category two-storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.
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/ 19 September 2006
Pope Benedict faced a growing chorus of demands on Tuesday for an unequivocal apology for remarks seen as portraying Islam as a violent faith, despite attempts by Western leaders and churchmen to defuse the crisis. Even United States President George Bush got involved, saying on Monday the pope had been ”sincere” when he said sorry to Muslims.
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/ 19 September 2006
Stock markets across Africa, beset by feeble volumes of trade and lack of liquidity, are trying to work closer together in a bid to increase transparency and attract more foreign investment. ”There has to be a change in the way international investors perceive Africa and its stock exchanges,” according to Maged Shawky Sourail, chief executive of African Stock Exchanges Assocation.
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/ 19 September 2006
Zambia has received more than -million in aid this year from Western donors, a senior official said on Monday. ”The European Union has disbursed -million as direct budget support … while the UK has disbursed ,4-million,” said Evans Chibiliti, head of Zambia’s treasury.
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/ 19 September 2006
Israel dropped at least 350Â 000 cluster bomblets on south Lebanon in its war with Hezbollah guerrillas, mostly when the conflict was all but over, leaving a deadly legacy for civilians. ”The outrageous fact is that nearly all of these munitions were fired in the last three to four days of the war,” said David Shearer, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon.
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/ 19 September 2006
The Somali government on Tuesday appealed for international help to investigate a failed bid to assassinate President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, blamed on the al-Qaeda network, which killed 11 people. As authorities interrogated two suspects, government spokesperson Abdirahman Mohamed Nur Dinari said they needed foreign expertise to investigate the attack.