President Thabo Mbeki has opted for a minimalist Cabinet reshuffle after the promotion of minister of minerals and energy Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka to Deputy President, but he has sent some signals on the management of the economy.
The United Nations Security Council has adopted a resolution to create a mixed truth commission and a special court to prosecute war crimes and human-rights violations during decades of civil war in Burundi. The country’s Minister of Justice, welcomed the adoption of resolution 1606 at the United Nations headquarters in New York this week.
The war in Iraq is creating a new breed of Islamic jihadists who could go on to destabilise other countries, according to a CIA report. The CIA believes Iraq to be potentially worse than Afghanistan, which produced thousands of jihadists in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the recruits to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda had fought in Afghanistan.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) is to probe the subsidisation of cellphones with a view to ensuring that customers benefit from number portability and shorter contracts. A discussion document released by Icasa proposes a regulatory framework to govern the use of subsidised handsets.
Regulation cost South African firms R79-billion in 2004. This is the bottom-line result of Small Business Project’s pioneering study of regulatory compliance costs to the South African private sector, from large corporations through small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to the informal sector.
The European Commission’s proposals, announced this week, to reform the sugar industry are expected to have little impact on the South African industry. Experts are predicting dire consequences for lesser developed countries, but the effect on South African producers is expected to be limited.
Shell and its partners recently found themselves facing a legal suit from local rural communities and Western environmentalists over allegations of causing pollution and global warming by flaring gas in Nigeria. The case was lodged in the Federal High Court of Nigeria in Benin City by the Gbarain and other communities.
With a local election under its belt, and legislative and presidential polls scheduled for the next two months, Burundi is entering the final stretch of a lengthy and difficult peace process. For most of the past 12 twelve years, rebels from the majority Hutu ethnic group have been at war with government troops dominated by minority Tutsis.
It was a question of when not if for oil traders on Tuesday as the price of a barrel of crude threatened to burst through the -a-barrel barrier for the first time. News that the North Sea Forties oil field had been shut because of technical problems pushed an already jittery market, which has jumped 11% in the past week alone, to a new record high of ,55 for US light crude.
Passion, power and sex wrapped in fab music: see U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. I couldn’t disagree more with Mail & Guardian reviewer Khubu Meth (Friday, May 13), who finds it irrelevant to 21st-century South Africa. What could be more relevant to a country where a woman is murdered by her partner every six hours, than a story where the heroine is killed by her lover?