Listed short-term insurer Santam has launched South Africa’s first affordable household insurance product aimed at the lower-income sector, the company announced on Monday. The new product, called Santam MultiHome, is initially being launched to homeowners in Soweto.
Short rains have killed scores of Kenya’s famed wildlife herds in the Rift Valley region, amid a searing drought that had already decimated livestock and wild animals across the East African region. Wildlife officials in Hell’s Gate National Park in the Rift Valley province said weakened animals ate too much vegetation after recent rains in isolated areas in the country.
Faecal pollution from human settlements is a big threat to groundwater reserves in South Africa, says the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. Some schemes utilising groundwater had been shut down, and others were being closely monitored as a result of this pollution, said the department’s manager for information programmes, Eberhard Braune.
Farmer Badiuddin Ahmed points to the outline of the long dried-up river that once irrigated his land. "We used to swim and have boat races in this river," he says. "It gave us fish to eat. Our lands were fertile. But now it is as dry and dusty as the land." Water — the lifeblood of Bangladesh’s agriculture-based economy — is everywhere in the South Asian nation.
Most of the undeclared business interests of Cabinet ministers and their deputies were in companies that no longer existed, the Presidency said on Sunday. ”A preliminary investigation indicated that most of the directorships found to have been undeclared involved defunct or dormant companies that are not operating, or companies from which they had resigned,” spokesperson Murphy Morobe said in a statement.
Zimbabwe’s veteran opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was on Sunday elected for a fresh tenure to lead his splintered party which has posed the most serious challenge to President Robert Mugabe’s long rule. ”The president has been nominated unopposed,” declared Movement for Democratic Change national chairperson Isaac Matongo after a two-day convention in the capital.
Transnet chief executive Maria Ramos has agreed in principle to reconsider the transfer date of Metrorail — a move that could see the resolution of the long-standing impasse between the company and labour. As expected, Ramos has also decided to suspend the disposal of Transnet’s long-distance bus service, Autopax.
One team is dominating formula one. Only instead of Ferrari, it’s Renault. Rather than the familar red racers out front, it’s the blue-and-yellow of Giancarlo Fisichella and world champion Fernando Alonso, who finished 1-2 and in the Malaysian Grand Prix made it look easy.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez flung fresh insults at his United States counterpart George Bush on Sunday, calling him a ”coward” over his handling of the Iraq war. ”Come here, Mr Danger, you are a coward, murderer, genocidal, alcoholic, drunk, immoral — you are the worst, Mr Danger, you are sick, and I know so personally,” Chávez said.
Hundreds of people have attacked and torched a mining camp run by a local subsidiary of United States giant Newmont on Indonesia’s Sumbawa island, a company spokesperson said on Monday. The attack on Sunday followed in the wake of deadly clashes in Indonesia’s Papua province last week during protests to demand the closure of a gold and copper mine run by US firm Freeport-McMoRan.