A lot happened during the time the so-called Muslim faithful set about their holy task of riot, pillage and arson over the notoriously unfunny caricatures of Islam’s last prophet. The shackled, manacled and hooded Muslim detainees on hunger strike against their indefinite detention at Camp X-Ray were being nourished with tubes shoved down their throats.
South Africa’s latest skills recruitment drive is an initiative infused with a sense of urgency by its driver, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. Set to be launched later this month, the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisitionis seen by the government as a key component of its recently unveiled economic growth plan.
Banks are not usually seen as an easy touch for loans, usually requiring collateral that many would-be borrowers do not have. But in the case of student loans, leading banks say the only limitation is students who do not realise that money is available.
"Our biggest problem is that we have no school; none of the children can study," says Edmond Tadahy, as his five-year-old daughter clambers across his lap. The kitchen in the home of this father of five, located in a remote village in north-eastern Madagascar, is filled with the acrid smoke of roasting coffee. On this vast Indian Ocean island, stories like Tadahy’s are common.
The three-year jail term handed down on David Irving by a Viennese court for denying that the Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews at Auschwitz, and for declaring Adolf Hitler innocent of that crime, evidently left him stunned. It also stirred a backlash in the United Kingdom, where sections of the media and the intelligentsia persist in seeing Irving as a harmless eccentric.
A few years ago I noticed something strange was happening in my native United States. I would turn on the television and find strippers in nipple-tassels explaining how to lap-dance a man to orgasm. I would flip the channel and see babes in tiny uniforms bouncing up and down on trampolines.
Iraq is on the verge of breaking up along religious, ethnic and tribal lines — a process bloodily amplified by the Shia versus Sunni violence in the wake the recent bomb attack on the gold-domed shrine in Samarra, the International Crisis Group says in a report.
Click on image for full-size view.
![]()
The Democratic Alliance said on Monday afternoon that it had been offered a deal that would give it control of the city of Cape Town. DA Western Cape leader Theuns Botha said the offer would give a grouping of 106 seats — enough for a clear majority in the 210-seat council.
Continental ministers of energy and water affairs were to co-operate at a conference on developing hydropower’s potential to provide affordable energy to Africans, Minerals and Energy Minister Lindiwe Hendricks said. The two-day conference is taking place in Johannesburg.