For 16 years Rukhsana Ali managed to hide her husband Wajid’s heroin addiction from their son and daughter, all the while ignoring her family’s repeated pleas to leave him. It paid off when Wajid kicked the habit last year, one of a growing number of drug users in Pakistan saved by determined spouses who resist social pressures and potential ostracism by their relatives.
The latest Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, in which some of the businesses that help keep the impoverished area afloat were destroyed, appears to be alienating even the most moderate of Palestinians. In the Maghazi refugee camp, the debris of broken sewing machines crunches under the feet of Ahmad Abdel Jawad. Before his clothes factory was demolished, he sold all of his production to customers in Israel.
When Maria Bartiromo started getting e-mails from someone calling himself Joey Ramone in 1998, she did what most people would do — she ignored them, assuming she had attracted the unwanted attention of a weirdo. Ramone, the legendary figure of New York punk, had after all recorded the likes of Cretin Hop, Teenage Lobotomy and Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue and here he apparently was asking for investment advice.
To suggest, in the current highly charged political atmosphere, that South Africans should become serious about engagement, would be regarded by some as outright dangerous. But the causes of the current tensions within the ruling alliance, between the governing coalition and opposition parties, and between the coalition and many civil society organisations, are precisely the reasons why we have to become serious about engagement.
Western aid agencies ”brushed aside” the work of local community groups in a rush to spend the record-breaking donations raised after the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, according to a report published last week. A failure to consult local people meant a quarter of the fishing boats that were donated were unseaworthy.
A multibillion-rand manganese empowerment deal is on the brink of collapse because a Chinese-led company has attempted to monopolise the deal through shareholder misrepresentation, sources close to the transaction have claimed. The Department of Minerals and Energy will invoke Section 47 of the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act to cancel the lucrative manganese prospecting rights.
The Bank of Japan raised interest rates from zero for the first time in six years, in a move that reflected growing confidence in the country’s economic recovery. The nine members of the central bank’s board voted unanimously in favour of a modest rise of a quarter of a percentage point.
United States President George W Bush was against diplomacy before he was for it. But with the collapse of US foreign policy from the Middle East to North Korea he has claimed to have become a born-again realist. ”And it’s, kind of … painful .. for some to watch, because it takes a while to get people on the same page,” he said at his July 7 press conference.
China’s annual growth soared to 11,3% in the second quarter of this year, the fastest rise in more than a decade, on the back of strong exports and investment, the Chinese government said this week. The world’s fourth-largest economy may now face higher interest rates, economists believe, to reduce its reliance on cheap money and the risk of overheating.
In the middle of the World Cup, I was on BBC radio, arguing with Fiona McIntosh, a Grazia magazine columnist, about the Wags who, at the time, were the wives and girlfriends of the England football team. At the moment, the Wags have become the Swags (Summit Wives and Girlfriends, for G8).