<b>CD OF THE WEEK:</b> On her new album, <i>Wildflower</i>, Sheryl Crow is not quite the rock chick any more. And though the instant likeability of past Crow hits occasionally shines through, this is an album that’s hard to care for, writes Riaan Wolmarans. Also reviews of the Foo Fighters, DJ Jazzy D, Ry Cooder and others.
Africa. South Africa. Nigeria. Darfur. Swaziland. Côte d’Ivoire. These are not places we can leave behind. We live there. Bono’s great, but he is your wake-up call, not ours. Africa is too big for soundbites and too complex for generalisations. Imagine that Europe should be thus covered: "The Hopeless Continent. Its economic heart [Germany] is broken; the mafia is threatening a fragile new government [Italy]".
What do Tony Leon, Jo’burg rockabilly band the Slashdogs and Pastor Mark Taylor from Zimbabwe have in common? The answer is all three have embraced the new digital fad that is podcasting. A podcast is an audio file that can be downloaded by multiple users and listened to on a portable music player or a computer.
A great deal of concern and angst has arisen following a decision, made after a year of intensive brow-knitting by the Commission for Gender Equality. This august body has decided that male homosexual-only guesthouses are not only quite okay, but Constitution-friendly as well.
Arab foreign ministers will hold an extraordinary meeting in Cairo on Saturday to discuss the latest deadly escalation between Israel and Lebanon and the Palestinians. The meeting "will examine the serious situation in Lebanon and in Palestine, as well as the aggressions and threats made by Israel against them," the pan-Arab body said in a statement.
With the competition authorities rejecting a tie-up between privately owned Sasol and Engen, owned by Malaysia’s Petronas, there are signs that the state-owned PetroSA may be getting ready to grow muscles in the domestic market. Senior PetroSA and government officials met Petronas in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, last month.
I was 14 years old when We Are the World filled our television screens — and I discovered that we are loved. That was an amazing kind of love: a giant chorus of exotic-looking people coming together as one, and they pouted and gurgled and they agreed.
Hizbullah had previously threatened to capture Israeli soldiers, but it had limited its attacks to shelling across the border. Wednesday’s strike marked the Islamic militia’s biggest operation since 2000, when Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon.
Last Saturday, I had lunch with friends in London at a benefit for the medical school at the Arab University in Jerusalem. At home later, I watched the news on al-Jazeera: 12 more Palestinians killed by the Israeli army. There were sirens. There were young men bending to kiss the forehead of their fallen comrade, while his mother sat rocking and speechless.
Ehud Olmert lost no time in describing the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Lebanese guerrillas as an ”act of war”. That stark formulation was doubtless intended to frighten the Beirut government into reining in the Hizbullah fighters who attacked across the international border.