Like a small black football, it lies in the dirt not far from Haitham Daaboul’s front door in the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil. It looks innocuous, but a careless kick from a passing child would detonate this cluster bomb, one of thousands of unexploded devices Israel scattered over the towns, villages and hillsides of south Lebanon.
Of all the down-home bits of nitwit advice offered up by hillbilly philosophers, perhaps the most grating is the one that demands participation before it will allow criticism. Invariably delivered with a wry, slightly superior feyness that is intended to look like wisdom but comes off as constipation, it is the last line of defence for a certain kind of cultural collaborator, and it goes something like, "Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it."
Absa was voted the top banking brand in South Africa in the <i>2006 Sunday Times/Markinor Top Brands Survey</i>, announced in Johannesburg on Thursday evening. The <i>Top Brands Survey</i> is considered to be the country’s leading study of an organisation’s brand strength and competitiveness.
South African platinum miner Impala Platinum on Friday reported a 39% increase in diluted headline earnings per share (HEPS) to 5 989 cents for the year ended June from 4 322 cents a year ago. Basic HEPS were also up 39% to 6 006 cents from 4 325 cents before.
Six opposition parties urged President Thabo Mbeki on Thursday to sack Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, while her ministry said she had no plans to quit. ”The ministry of health reiterates its position that the minister of health will not resign,” read a statement issued in the afternoon by her spokesperson, Sibani Mngadi.
The archetypal Western bar brawl is curious for its wanton pointlessness: everybody slugs everybody else with considerable vigour, and yet very few seem to know — or care — what the circumstances of the original disagreement were. It’s as if there are two default states — placid chaw-mastication, and wholesale butt-kicking — separated by nothing but a couple of seconds.
Sudanese Islamist leaders say they will take up arms against United Nations peacekeepers if they deploy to Darfur, and some have warned they will also fight the Khartoum government if it agrees to the force. The threats conjure up a disturbing image of more bloodshed in the western Darfur region, where tens of thousands of people have been killed in more than three years of conflict.
The French President, Jacques Chirac, opened the way for the formation of a 15 000-strong United Nations peacekeeping force for Lebanon on Thursday night by promising France would contribute 2 000 troops. Other European countries are likely to follow France’s lead by making firm commitments at a meeting in Brussels on Friday.
Sixty-three percent of Israelis want Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign in a sharp public backlash over his handling of the war in Lebanon, a newspaper poll showed on Friday. The Yedioth Aronoth, Israel’s biggest circulation newspaper, called the poll a political ”earthquake” for the Olmert government.
Bafowethu — Our Brothers — are taking a breather halfway through a photo shoot in a grungy-chic Cape Town studio, and seeing them sprawled, stylishly slothful, across a couple of couches in their uniform tracksuits, it’s easy to assume that one has stumbled across a Santos or Ajax development squad.