Is this the best of times for South African literature? South Africans are buying more South African books. There are high-profile literary awards (leave aside, for now, the weak representation of poetry), successful local literature promotions, popular magazines commissioning new work by writers and a robust literary festival circuit.
The Palestinian foreign minister returned to the Gaza Strip on Wednesday from a trip abroad with an estimated -million packed in 12 separate suitcases, according to officials. Mahmoud Zahar, a member of Hamas, declared the amount he was carrying to Egyptian officials at the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.
A preliminary investigation by law firm Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom into the appointment of project managers on the N2 Gateway housing project in Cape Town has found no evidence of direct political interference or corruption.The investigation found that at worst there was a ”lack of clarity” about the roles of various panels and committees involved in the project.
Months before an air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, United States military commanders and intelligence officers in Iraq tried to persuade the office of the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the White House to ”degrade” his inflated image; they resisted, ultimately for ”domestic political reasons”, as a military source told me.
The Afghanistan province being patrolled by British troops will produce at least a third of the world’s heroin this year, according to drug experts who are forecasting a record harvest that will be an embarrassment for the Western-funded war on narcotics. British officials are bracing themselves for the result of an annual United Nations poppy survey.
A day of panic selling in the world’s financial markets on Tuesday knocked off the price of a barrel of oil, provided the sharpest one-day fall in gold for 13 years. Amid growing fears that rising global interest rates could bring a halt to the boom in asset prices of recent years, the toughest day for Japan’s Nikkei index since the 9/11 terrorist attacks was followed by extreme nervousness in European markets.
The unemployment rate in the United Kingdom hit its highest level in three and a half years in April, official data showed recently, while earnings growth remained subdued. The Office for National Statistics said unemployment for the three months leading up to April rose from 5,1% to 5,3%, its highest since September 2002.
Strong trade unions and employment-protection laws can go hand-in-hand with low levels of unemployment, the West’s leading think tank said last week in a keynote study that rejected the notion that there was a single blueprint for a successful labour market.
The cellphone rings. A message has just come in. Tendai Mukaro suspiciously glances around and chuckles as he reads the humorous message. Then in a minute he is punching on his phone, posting the just-received joke to family and friends. It is the order of the day in Harare and other cities around the country.
The death toll in Angola’s cholera epidemic has reached near the 1 900 mark, with the number of cases exceeding 46 000, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday. From February 13 to June 19 this year, ”a total of 46 758 cumulative cases and 1 893 deaths have been reported in 14 out of the 18 provinces” in Angola, a WHO statement said.