South Africa needs to achieve "significantly higher rates" of economic growth if it is to succeed in meeting the needs of the people, President Thabo Mbeki has told trade unionists. He said one of the issues being studied by his government was import parity pricing as it affected the chemical industry.
A settlement with unions involved in the nationwide gold miners’ strike was very close, the Chamber of Mines said on Thursday evening. Spokesperson Frans Baker said the chamber had offered an increase of between six and seven percent — and seven percent for lower paid workers — on behalf of all four major mining houses.
It is not often that computer users cheer a victory for Microsoft, the software firm whose uncompromising success has made founder Bill Gates the world’s richest man. But many will have shared his satisfaction on Wednesday after the computer giant claimed a victory when a man dubbed the ”Spam King” agreed to pay the company -million.
A vast expanse of western Siberia is undergoing an unprecedented thaw that could dramatically increase the rate of global warming, climate scientists warn on Thursday. Researchers who have recently returned from the region found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11Â 000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
African News Dimension (AND), a start-up media company, is launching a news service for the continent on 1 September 2005. Ralston Smith, CEO of AND, says the network will focus on providing video content, as well as audio, photographs and copy for sale through its website (www.andnetwork.com). <p>
Politicians spend a great deal of our time and money passing myriad laws aimed at making us think they’re very busy people. The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy may neither be created nor destroyed, so they’re obviously putting lots of effort into converting worthwhile tasks into bullshit just to impress us voters.
The godfather of canned hunting in South Africa was a Portuguese man who owned a game farm in northern KwaZulu-Natal in the 1970s. He had a nice little scam going with Gauteng zoos, which sold him "surplus" wild animals. He took them in the back of his car to a piece of open veld in the Magaliesberg for "hunters" to shoot.
So, you have a little bit of money and you want to go someplace. You can either rely on the glossy handouts from your local travel agency, or you can do a little bit of online snooping in advance — and create the mother of all trips for yourself. But let’s look at local prices briefly, which are sufficient reason for projectile vomiting all by themselves.
President Thabo Mbeki and his government are desperately trying to limit public embarrassment over the widely publicised political conditions they have reportedly attached to an emergency bail-out for President Robert Mugabe. They should have followed the diplomatic principle enunciated by classical Greek dramatist Euripides.
According to Visdorp mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo, this week’s taxpayer-funded R200 000 makietie for women in the city’s administration was all about empowering the fairer sex. Empowerment is a crummy job but someone’s got to do it, and luckily our Nomaindia’s been empowering people for years.