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/ 14 November 2005
In her black coat and white headscarf, Sajida al-Rishawi looked like many other Arab women. But the shapeless garment made it easy for her to conceal a belt of explosives and a belt of ball bearings — and her mission, along with her husband, to blow up a hotel full of wedding guests.
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/ 14 November 2005
The R16-billion that will flow into Venfin after it sells its stake in Vodacom to UK-based Vodafone has raised speculation about what will become of its media asset, e.tv. If Venfin shareholders accept the offer, its assets, which include 33 percent of e.tv, a seven percent stake in Dimension Data and a 25 percent share in Alexander Forbes, will be sold into a new unlisted company, Newco.
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/ 14 November 2005
Burn the textbooks. Forget that fuddy-duddy stuff about demand and supply. Blow a raspberry at economic theory. That, apparently, is the message being sent out by the foreign exchange markets, where the dollar reached a two-year high against the euro and the yen last week.
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/ 14 November 2005
”At the very grand Friedman house, Tall Trees, on First Avenue in Johannesburg, Lulu Friedman ran a salon with her able co-host and husband, Barn Friedman, a United Party parliamentarian. It was there that Gordimer met Alan Paton in 1951, during the still reverberating success of Cry, the Beloved Country, a book that mobilised international political awareness of apartheid.”
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/ 14 November 2005
It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.
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/ 14 November 2005
In late 1991, after riots between youths and police scarred the suburbs of Lyon, Alain Touraine, the French sociologist, predicted: ”It will only be a few years before we face the kind of massive urban explosion the Americans have experienced.” The fortnight of consecutive violence following the deaths of two young Muslim men of African descent in a Paris suburb show that Touraine’s dark vision of a ghettoised, post-colonial France is now upon us.
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/ 13 November 2005
The South African Police Service is spending R66,5-million a year on hiring private security companies to guard its stations and police buildings. The 10 security firms benefiting most from this bonanza include three that appear not to be registered with the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority — a statutory requirement.
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/ 13 November 2005
The stereotypical editor is a grumpy old man who talks in grunts and whose desk is full of dirty coffee cups. It’s an enduring image, fuelled by journalists who seem to take pride in having worked under awful bosses. Get a group of them together, and the chances are they will begin trying to trump each other with war stories. My editor was worse than yours — that sort of thing.
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/ 13 November 2005
Novelist David Westheimer, who wrote My Sweet Charlie and Von Ryan’s Express that was turned into a movie starring Frank Sinatra, has died. He was 88. Westheimer died on Tuesday of heart failure at the UCLA Medical Centre, according to his son Fred.