Western supermarket chains are surging into the fast-growing Chinese market. This week, Wal-Mart — the world’s biggest retailer — declared its intention to lead the charge, announcing that it will hire up to 150 000 new staff in China over the next five years. The plan is the most ambitious attempt yet to convert China to Western consumer culture — albeit with a local flavour.
One would have assumed that the tumultuous chorus that this week accompanied the proposed formation of a human rights commission in Zimbabwe was a response to a presidential decree that any person found without a Zanu-PF membership card would be flogged at two-hourly intervals in a public square.
What started as a dream for 23-year-old Natalia quickly turned into a nightmare. ”I wanted to come to Greece, to go to the islands. They bought me and now I am doing this. They’ve told me that they’ll kill me if I try to escape,” she says, before rushing off towards the hotel where one of her sex-trade clients is waiting.
Last year alone, 1,6-million people were arrested by United States-Mexico border protection authorities and at least that many escaped detection and made it into the US. It is an issue that is splitting the Republican and Democratic parties as they grapple with new laws to regulate this movement of people.
A fatwa issued by Egypt’s top religious authority that forbids the display of statues has art lovers fearing it could be used by Islamic extremists as an excuse to destroy Egypt’s historical heritage. Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa issued the religious edict that declared as un-Islamic the exhibition of statues in homes.
The fire in which 12 people died in Johannesburg’s CBD last week has highlighted the dangers faced daily by residents of the city’s numerous condemned buildings, who live without electricity or sanitation and are forced to cook on primus stoves and open fires.
It’s nice, isn’t it, when someone’s in the public eye for so long, and so variously, that you start to look upon them as a friend. I feel like that about Kate Moss — I know when she splits up with Babyshambles bad boy Pete Doherty and when she gets back together with him again; and I know where she hides her cocaine when she goes abroad.
A key survey on March 28 showed that business confidence in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, unexpectedly jumped to its highest level in 15 years in March. This boosted expectations that the European Central Bank will soon raise interest rates again.
A year after Charles Taylor launched his rebellion from deep in the Liberian forest sparking war across the region, his mother said he had always been a stubborn child. ”Among all my children, Charles’s attitude is just different. He is a very stubborn person — since his childhood days,” Taylor’s mother, Yassa Zoe Taylor, said in 1990.
Israelis convinced themselves this was to be the dull election, the one marked by a record low turnout and apathy. A people who complain they live in a land with too much history seemed in no mood to make some more. But make it they have. Last Tuesday they voted to reject once and for all the ideology that had dominated the state for more than three decades.