The New Zealand cricket team departed on Monday for Africa to prepare for its August series in Zimbabwe as lawmakers continued to press for the cancellation of the tour. The Parliamentary Green Party, which has rallied opposition to the tour in protest at human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, said it was not too late for the New Zealand government to intervene.
World number one diamond miner De Beers is disappointed by the fall in the group’s interim earnings and headline earnings, De Beers managing director Gary Ralfe said on Monday. Global resources group Anglo American has a 45% stake in De Beers.
With no end in sight to wage disputes, strikes at South African Airways (SAA) and Pick ‘n Pay were due to enter their fourth day on Monday. SAA said it expected the SA Transport and Allied Workers Association and the United Association of SA to respond to its final offer by Monday.
The Wallabies were rattled by playing at high altitude, the ”wow” factor of meeting Nelson Mandela and their historically woeful playing record at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park, the Australian media said on Monday. The Wallabies were ”horrible, playing some of the worst Australian rugby for some time in the opening 30 minutes as they fell behind 20-3,” The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Greg Growden wrote.
Egyptian police made a series of arrests on Sunday as they stepped up the hunt for the network behind three deadly bombings, but officials admitted they had no clear leads over who was behind the country’s worst terrorist attack, and many of the suspects were later released.
Up to 40 people were killed on Sunday in a suicide bombing in Baghdad as violence continued to undermine efforts to draft Iraq’s first Constitution. The United States military said a suicide bomber had driven a truck loaded with explosives into a police station in eastern Baghdad. Most of the victims were thought to be civilians.
South Africans, by and large, have been reluctant to invest offshore while the South African markets have been relatively strong and the rand staged an amazing recovery, making it one of the strongest currencies in the world over the past three years. Recent rand weakness will have tempted some investors to look offshore again, but investing offshore is not just about hedging your rand bets.
When I was last in Budapest (this is going back some years now — before the Coca-Cola signs went up) I was drawn into the extraordinary world of relics, icons and iconography. Hungary had gone through several revolutions by then — some successful, some not. I am not talking about revolutions that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, nor necessarily of the Hungarian Spring of 1956.
In 1991, the then Bophuthatswana Parks Board launched the Madikwe project by commandeering a few army planes to fly a pack of journalists up to a farmhouse in Herman Charles Bosman country. They were treated to a lavish feast and spun a seductive tale about the birth of a brand new game reserve.
The extraordinary contest between rival empowerment groups over control of Tsogo Sun has led to both factions claiming board control to the point of running parallel board meetings. This dispute, one of several, is now being fought in court. One faction, led by Hosken Consolidated Investments, attempted to unseat Michael Leaf, chairperson of Tsogo Sun’s holding company.