South Africa this week marks the 30th anniversary of a watershed in its anti-apartheid struggle when hundreds of children in Soweto protesting the forced teaching of Afrikaans died in a brutal police crackdown. The June 16 youth protest began in the black township of Soweto, spreading like wildfire across the country and marking a turning point in the liberation movement.
Billionaire basketball team owner Mark Cuban was a no-show, but the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund made it and pop star Prince rounded off the evening by throwing a guitar over his head. The occasion was the 10th annual Webby awards — the self-proclaimed Oscars of the internet — which drew a large and varied group of winners from across the cyberspace world.
There is likely to be a major sell-off of the JSE over the next few months, says Mark Wurr, head of trading at brokerage firm Global Trader. While most of this will be foreigners taking profits in a market that ramped up more than 70% in a year, the market will settle down again once all the froth is out, providing buying opportunities later in the year.
Whether you walk by or speed past in your car with the windows rolled up, the overwhelming stench from the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto will get to you. The combination of the smell from the landfill and the dust from the nearby mine dumps means that residents from Meadowlands Zone 11, parts of Dobsonville and the Bramfischerville settlement are plagued by dust, smells and fears for their health.
Sevder is seething. Growing up in poverty, he has seen schoolmates shot dead by Turkish security forces and had to put up with the vulgar taunts of Turkish policemen towards his mother and sisters. His grudges have been nourished by endless tales of family and friends burnt out of their villages and decanted into the slums of Diyarbakir.
The challenging reality of access young girls have to termination-of-pregnancy services is acknowledged in a report by the national Department of Health, detailing the first seven years of abortion legislation in South Africa. The report focuses on the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, implemented in February 1997 and amended in 2004.
The governor of Idaho, an affable rancher named Jim Risch, stretched back in his chair and outlined his alternative history of the past few years in the United States. ”Hurricane Katrina — they heaped that on George Bush!” said Risch in the dry heat of an afternoon in Boise, the state capital.
Battling to keep pace with hyper-inflation, the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank plans to introduce a million bank note in September, after introducing a 000 note just last month. Bearer cheques were meant to have a three-month life span, but have replaced the now worthless paper currency.
Someone once said: “Those who can, do and those who can’t, teach.” I suppose that might depict the majority of us currently in the profession as no-hopers and failures. However, this is hardly the case as the demands on a teacher today are simply enormous and stressful.
The authorities at Guantánamo were accused on Monday of blocking inmates’ access to mental health care, despite dozens of suicide attempts and hundreds of cases of self-harm. As further details emerged of three suicides, George Bush’s administration faced renewed criticism of the camp’s conditions and its policy of indefinite detention.