After being smacked around since May 11 in equity, bonds and commodities in both the developed and emerging world, it is hard for investors to keep focused on the fundamentals. Globally, investors — not least of all our own Reserve Bank — have begun to fear that this may be the beginning of another 1998-style emerging market crisis. But this is not 1998.
Ungoverned and ungovernable since 1991, Somalia is once again receiving the kind of attention it was burdened with a decade ago, when international peacekeepers tried unsuccessfully to bring order to the chaos-torn country. The United States and the Arab League have redoubled their efforts to create a dialogue between the transitional government of Abdullahi Yusuf and the Islamic Courts.
The biggest black economic empowerment deal of the year may not even be a deal. And it may not even be that big in monetary terms. Yet its implications are huge. In February, IBM announced it would add 900 jobs to the 500 it already has at its South African call centre.
NGOs played a key role in fighting South Africa’s apartheid system of government, and have remained vocal during the first decade of democracy in the country. But, civil society activists now caution that this benign state of affairs should not be taken at face value. Funding remains a contentious issue, for instance.
While the international community has invested Sierra Leone’s recovery in trials and tribunals, Sierra Leoneans themselves have relied on family and sheer inner will to rebuild lives devastated by the country’s civil war. The award-winning documentary <i>The Refugee All Stars</i> captures this resilience of the human spirit in a Guinean refugee camp.
Are we on the threshold of a new age — that of knowledge societies? The scientific upheavals of the 20th century have brought about a third industrial revolution, that of the new technologies, which are essentially intellectual technologies. This revolution, which has been accompanied by a further advance of globalisation, has laid down the bases of a knowledge economy.
Now that former Liberian president Charles Taylor has been flown off the continent to face charges of war crimes at The Hague, West Africans are turning their attention to another African leader who faces prosecution away from home. Ex-Chadian president Hissene Habre, who has been living in exile in Senegal since 1990.
A braided leather whip, a sniper rifle, six jars of fertiliser and a copy of the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook were among the presents foreign leaders have given United States President George W Bush. They are clearly trying to tell him something. The inventory of official gifts from 2004, published recently by the State Department, reads like the wish list of a paranoid survivalist.
Hamas has made a major political climbdown by agreeing to sections of a document that recognises Israel’s right to exist and a negotiated two-state solution, according to Palestinian leaders. In a bitter struggle for power, Hamas is bowing to an ultimatum from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to endorse the document drawn up by Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails.
An angry George W Bush rounded on the two remaining members of Washington’s ”axis of evil” recently, as he dismissed ”absurd” suggestions that the United States presents the greatest threat to world stability. At a summit with the European Union in Vienna, President Bush made it clear that he believes that Iran and North Korea pose the most serious danger when he warned them not to test his patience.