Crucial charities dependent on the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund for money have been hard hit by an extraordinary delay in the allocation of grants applied for last year. The Mail & Guardian spoke to six charities that bemoaned the fund’s silence on their applications.
This week the bloodstained three-month security guards’ strike was finally settled on an effective automatic pay rise of R232, or 19,89% for the lowest paid workers and annual increments for the next three years of 9,25%, 7,25% and 7,25% respectively. Nerine Kahn, director of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, walks the Mail & Guardian down the long road to mediation.
It must be an unsettling experience: the phone rings and some upstart journalist wants comment on that particular piece of dirty washing that you’d hoped nobody knew about. The call proves that far from being well hidden, your little secret is about to be displayed to the world. And you have far too little time to develop some kind of defence.
A New York politician has dropped a federal lawsuit that had claimed the search engine company Google profits from child pornography. Jeffrey Toback, a member of the Nassau County Legislature from Oceanside, on Long Island, filed suit in May claiming Google had ”paid links” to websites containing child pornography.
At Newlands on Saturday we may be treated to a preview of the 2007 World Cup final; host nation France are among the favourites, while the resurgence of Springbok rugby under coach Jake White has not been ignored by the bookmakers. It would, however, be extremely unwise to use events in Cape Town as a form line for the most important trophy in the game.
Intel unveiled a plant on Thursday that manufactures the semiconductor company’s newest 65-nanometer chips, an industry-leading technology that allows computers to work faster using less energy. The plant, which began production three months ago, joins similar facilities in the United States in making Intel’s most efficient microprocessor.
The United States plans to keep pressing for an international force in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur province, despite fierce opposition from Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir. On Tuesday, al-Beshir rejected the deployment of an international force for Darfur, declaring that his country would not be ”recolonised”.
Britain’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said on Thursday it was investigating ”alleged price coordination” related to the imposition of fuel surcharges within the airline sector and that it had visited British Airways (BA) as part of the probe. BA earlier announced that the OFT and the United States Department of Justice were investigating alleged cartel activity involving it and other airlines.
Prosecutors at the United Nations genocide tribunal for Rwanda on Thursday sought a life sentence for a former military academy chief accused of genocide in the country’s 1994 mass slaughter. They said Tharcisse Muvunyi deserved the maximum sentence that can be handed down by the International Criminal Court for Rwanda for killing Tutsis in several localities in the southern town of Butare.
Toshiba said on Thursday it will start selling the world’s first recorders for the HD DVD high-definition video disc next month. The new recorder, the RD-A1, combines an HD DVD burner with a one-terabyte hard disk and can record and store up to 130 hours of high-definition broadcasts, Toshiba said in a statement.