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.
Still ashen-faced six days after escaping death, Dr Ali Faraj pulls his hair aside to display a scar above his left ear. One of Iraq’s top cardiologists, he was seeing a patient when a group of kidnappers wearing ski masks stormed into his Baghdad clinic, knocked his receptionist to the floor and when he emerged to investigate, ordered him to come with them.
Little by little, Vasily Grossman seems to be working his way into the consciousness of the modern world. ”If his name already means something to you, and especially if you have read his novel Life and Fate, you may share my view that it is only a matter of time before Grossman is acknowledged as one of the great writers of the 20th century,” writes Martin Kettle.
If you want an inexpensive weekend getaway less than two hours from Johannesburg and Pretoria, the Pilanesberg National Park in the North West offers a fantastic bush breakaway.
The words Harvard and knee-jerk are not often seen in the same sentence, but when a rumoured shortlist of candidates to succeed outgoing president Larry Summers pops up and the majority of the names on it are women, there is good cause.
A determined partnership of 56 by Mark Boucher and tail-ender Andre Nel saw South Africa through to a useful lead of 283 on the third day of the third Castle Lager Test against Australia at the Wanderers on Sunday. South Africa were 250 for eight when bad light stopped play 13 minutes early.
The South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) is not part of a wage deal reached in the security industry and will continue with intended strike action, a spokesperson said on Sunday. ”We did not sign the deal, we are not happy with it and we will continue to strike,” Randall Howard said.