Anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela turns 88 on Tuesday.
A heavyweight government salvage team has been sent into the Department of Home Affairs to rectify the financial disarray graphically detailed in a recent report by Auditor General Shauket Fakie. The task team began its work on July 1 and has a time-frame of six months.
The Fourth of July was celebrated with all the usual pomp and swagger in the United States, but less attention across the news media was given to another Fourth of July celebration right here on the African continent. This has become a day of national commemoration of the arrival of liberation forces in the wake of the unspeakable genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
In the charming if somewhat rundown marina of Larnaca, the cedar-emblazoned flag of Lebanon flies proudly from a yacht as nearby Israelis clad in <i>kippa</i> and prayer shawl prepare for the Sabbath. The holiday island of Cyprus and its coastal resorts, which have long played host to sworn foes in the Middle East, is once again gearing up to serve as safe haven for a troubled region.
In 2000/01 South Africa endured a cholera epidemic that spread throughout the eastern coastal region and to other provinces. It resulted in 265 deaths in five provinces and 117 147 people, mostly in KwaZulu-Natal, were infected. The epidemic was, according to the World Health Organisation, the biggest such outbreak in Africa for the reporting period.
Sports teams are known to lift the psyche of a nation when they’re winning, and send it into a state of depression when they are losing, but how are magazines sales affected? Stuart Graham looks at the dynamics of the sports print market.
By the time 2050 rolls around, current decision-makers will either be dead or stuck in old-age homes. Yet the decisions they make today will have a significant effect on the economic and environmental future. According to the International Energy Agency current emission policies, such the Kyoto Treaty, will not put the world on a path towards a sustainable future by 2050.
Ours is a coal culture. We have an abundance of the stuff, enough to make tons of electricity and supply a big chunk of our fuel needs as well. Our electricity is among the cheapest anywhere costing, say, just 20% of what they pay in Europe. So cheap that it has been used as an investment tool. Come here for cheap electricity, investors are told.
Violet Mthembu, who cares for three people every day, says that many of the sick and aged she looks after are either physically or economically incapable of collecting water from one of the stand pipes dotting the township — the only place where residents can access running water. "Some people have [prepaid] cards, but for others it’s too expensive, so we use our own cards," she says.
Israel was fighting on two fronts this week as one military disaster piled on another. Lebanese militia killed and captured troops on Israel’s northern border while the army launched a fresh ground assault into the Gaza Strip in pursuit of a third abducted soldier.