Nothing could have conjured the images of a riven country more eloquently than the Zimbabwe national day of prayer. An event meant to unite a country was marked by a slanging match that would not have looked out of place before a heavyweight boxing match.
Two of the guests invited to the seventh summit of the African Union in The Gambia this weekend are sure to get up the noses of Africa’s best Western friends.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, will share a platform with the leaders of the 53-nation grouping and, who knows, perhaps even upstage the enigmatic Moammar Gadaffi of Libya.
The subject matter was untested, the actors almost naked and the whole movie was to be made in a language spoken by only a tiny group of people — but to film executive Brian Rosen, funding Australia’s latest international film success, Ten Canoes, was a ”no-brainer”.
A tip-off from Virgin Atlantic led to the price-fixing inquiry into British Airways (BA), it has emerged, marking a return to the hostile relations that existed between the two airlines during the ”dirty tricks” campaign of the 1990s. BA was plunged into crisis after it said that the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading and the Justice Department in the United States are conducting a joint investigation into allegations of price-fixing.
Radio Marco Zero is a tiny radio station in Amapa, one of Brazil’s remotest Amazon states. Yet its few thousand listeners in the state capital, Macapa, have for the past month been able to hear exclusive hourly updates about the Brazilian national team. ”In the 254 years since Macapa was founded, no one has ever had the chance to come to a World Cup,” says Tarciso Franco, one of the station’s two journalists in Germany.
It is not yet quite a year since Israel withdrew its forces and dismantled illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip, though there has always been a grim inevitability about the offensive — codenamed Summer Rain — that Ehud Olmert unleashed this week to try to free a soldier abducted by Palestinian fighters.
The Virgin Money credit card makes for an excellent savings account. Paying 5% interest on any positive balance in the account, it beats any savings account in the market for smaller deposits. In order to qualify for that rate with an ordinary bank, you generally need a balance of about R20 000.
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The Dutch government has decided to resign after losing the support of its junior coalition partner in a row over Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said on Thursday. The prime minister added that he would probably go to meet Queen Beatrix, the Dutch head of state, on Friday.
In just four-and-a-half years, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has helped 544Â 000 HIV-positive people begin anti-retroviral treatment, distributed 11,3-million insecticide-treated bed nets and treated 1,4-million cases of tuberculosis. This is according to a progress report released by the fund on Thursday.