A preliminary investigation by law firm Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom into the appointment of project managers on the N2 Gateway housing project in Cape Town has found no evidence of direct political interference or corruption.The investigation found that at worst there was a ”lack of clarity” about the roles of various panels and committees involved in the project.
Months before an air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, United States military commanders and intelligence officers in Iraq tried to persuade the office of the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the White House to ”degrade” his inflated image; they resisted, ultimately for ”domestic political reasons”, as a military source told me.
The Afghanistan province being patrolled by British troops will produce at least a third of the world’s heroin this year, according to drug experts who are forecasting a record harvest that will be an embarrassment for the Western-funded war on narcotics. British officials are bracing themselves for the result of an annual United Nations poppy survey.
A day of panic selling in the world’s financial markets on Tuesday knocked off the price of a barrel of oil, provided the sharpest one-day fall in gold for 13 years. Amid growing fears that rising global interest rates could bring a halt to the boom in asset prices of recent years, the toughest day for Japan’s Nikkei index since the 9/11 terrorist attacks was followed by extreme nervousness in European markets.
The unemployment rate in the United Kingdom hit its highest level in three and a half years in April, official data showed recently, while earnings growth remained subdued. The Office for National Statistics said unemployment for the three months leading up to April rose from 5,1% to 5,3%, its highest since September 2002.
Strong trade unions and employment-protection laws can go hand-in-hand with low levels of unemployment, the West’s leading think tank said last week in a keynote study that rejected the notion that there was a single blueprint for a successful labour market.
The cellphone rings. A message has just come in. Tendai Mukaro suspiciously glances around and chuckles as he reads the humorous message. Then in a minute he is punching on his phone, posting the just-received joke to family and friends. It is the order of the day in Harare and other cities around the country.
The death toll in Angola’s cholera epidemic has reached near the 1 900 mark, with the number of cases exceeding 46 000, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday. From February 13 to June 19 this year, ”a total of 46 758 cumulative cases and 1 893 deaths have been reported in 14 out of the 18 provinces” in Angola, a WHO statement said.
For a company that claims to have moved ”beyond petroleum”, BP has managed to spill an awful lot of it on to the tundra in Alaska. After the news was leaked to journalists, it recently admitted to investors that it is facing criminal charges for allowing more than one million litres of crude oil to seep across one of the world’s most sensitive habitats.
The SABC will always be a contested terrain subjected to external pressure from sections of the public. These may be political bodies, commercial interests, sports bodies, cultural groups, trade unions et cetera. It would be surprising if this were not so, writes CE of the SABC, Dali Mpofu.