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.
A British drug company is seeking permission to conduct the first human trials of an experimental vaccine against the avian flu virus. The vaccine will target the lethal H5N1 strain of avian flu, which has spread rapidly throughout bird popu-lations in Asia and has been brought to Europe by flocks of migrating waterfowl.
”The one with the diarrhoea opens the door” might seem an unlikely sentence in a book explaining biblical scriptures. So too essays on witchcraft, rape, ancestral worship and female genital mutilation. But Africa Bible Commentary, a new 1 600-page tome, provides explanations of verses from all 66 books of the Bible, using local proverbs and idioms.
Heads or tails? The editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley bible Wired, and the man who has written the clearest explanation yet of the shift from the one-size-fits-all, mass-media world to a diverse, complex world of millions of niches, is keeping both options covered.
Lesotho’s single largest employer, the textile industry, has made a remarkable comeback, setting an example for the region and giving thousands back their jobs. Lesotho was an early victim of cheap Chinese exports to the key United States market when the World Trade Organisation’s 30-year-old Multi-Fibre Agreement expired last year.
Considering that the world has been wanting to see her without her clothes for more than 50 years, I reckon there should be few complaints at Sophia Loren now finally deciding, at close on 72, to pose for a picture in the Pirelli calendar. It remains unclear what precise state of déshabillement she is intending.
Factional politics in the Eastern Cape appear to have scuppered a multimillion-rand ecotourism project on the Wild Coast, and in the process chased a leading private tourism company out of South Africa. After years of haggling with politicians and bureaucrats, Wilderness Safaris says it has had enough.
Is it possible to be both an environmentalist and a super-rich petrolhead? The two worlds would seem to be mutually exclusive, but go to Laverstoke Park in Hampshire, southern England, owned by the South African-born 1979 Formula One world champion racing driver Jody Scheckter, and the answer is far from simple.
A former Zanu-PF provincial chairperson has spilled the beans on how the ruling party rigged the 2002 presidential election, which President Robert Mugabe won against most expectations. Dr Daniel Shumba is a retired army officer, former provincial chairperson of Zanu-PF and central committee member who was kicked out of the party last year.