Nobel Prize-winning South African author JM Coetzee became an Australian citizen on Monday, saying he had been attracted by the country’s ”free and generous spirit”. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and his writing, which won him the Booker Prize twice as well as the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflected the sufferings of a country torn by the racial policy of apartheid.
Hollywood seems to have embraced the South African reality of crime, grime and poverty after Tsotsi won the best foreign-language film Oscar on Sunday. The story of a violent young criminal living dangerously in and around the townships of Johannesburg has been lauded for its apt depiction of life for millions today.
The United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has told British MPs that military action could bring Iran’s nuclear programme to a halt if all diplomatic efforts fail. The warning came ahead of a meeting on Monday of the International Atomic Energy Agency which will forward a report on Iran’s nuclear activities to the UN security council.
Bernd Pischetsrieder, chief executive of Volkswagen, comes out fighting for his job on Tuesday against a campaign by his chairperson, Ferdinand Piech, to unseat him. Piech began an open power struggle within VW last week by publicly questioning whether the former BMW director deserved to have his contract extended for another five years.
Of course I knew it was a hoax. The phone rang and I made the mistake of answering it. It asked, in halting, Spanish-accented tones, if I spoke Afrikaans. That’s when I knew it was a hoax. "I have a story to tell," she continued, in English, after I had assured her that I did not speak a word of Afrikaans.
"As the Palestinian ambassador to South Africa, I would also like to share my views with your readers after reading Ilan Baruch’s article . As the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, one expects Baruch to be objective in his approach regarding the political rights of the Palestinian people," writes Ali Halimeh.
The South African business and mining landscape has just witnessed a low-key move by a giant in continental, or rather, global business. Sam Jonah, former executive president of AngloGold Ashanti, announced his biggest personal investment in South Africa. This marks a further entrenchment of roots in a new country by this Ghanaian native.
Residents in Harare say they live on a "cholera time-bomb" as the Zimbabwean city struggles to clean up garbage and maintain sewers in an outbreak that has already cost 27 lives. An unusually wet rainy season compounds the problem, especially in slum areas like Dzivarasekwa, about 10km north of the city, and the sprawling semi-urban area of Epworth, to the east.
Is it possible to have a productive pooch? Can that faithful friend make an economic contribution to the home? Are big dogs more fuel efficient than small dogs? The answer is yes, yes and, er, quite possibly. The Integrated Waste AManagement Board has a vision. It is a vision of a world — or, more specifically, a San Francisco — where landfills are obsolete and doggie bags have a whole different meaning.
The hymn We are Fighting for Jesus rang out across the Niger Delta as a boatful of balaclava-clad militants brandishing machine guns and rocket launchers greeted the international press corps. In a bizarre masquerade, the latest militia group to lay claim to the oil fields on the Delta handed astonished journalists a 69-year-old American hostage.