French President Jacques Chirac made an impassioned appeal to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Wednesday to trust his country and people in hosting the 2012 Olympic Games. ”I shall vouch for this, you can put your trust in France, you can trust the French, you can trust us,” Chirac said in a speech.
The retail and merchant banking sector continued to register strong confidence levels in the second quarter of this year on the back of a consumer-led boom, a scramble for Africa and increasing black economic empowerment activity. These are the findings of the 14th quarterly Ernst & Young financial services index, released on Wednesday.
The Iraq counter-insurgency is forcing the Pentagon to question its military doctrine that requires forces to be able to fight two major wars at the same time, it was claimed on Tuesday. A four-yearly review of United States military power is not due until early next year, but it is already clear that the strategy is under great strain from the Iraq war.
The French interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, sounded the death knell for the 50-year-old Franco-German alliance on Tuesday and suggested instead a core group of six European states. Sarkozy said the Franco-German alliance was no longer practical in an European Union of 25 states.
Canada’s placid and innocent society was shattered with the release from prison of the country’s most notorious female sex killer this week. Reporters camped for days outside the Ste-Anne-des-Plaines penitentiary north of Montreal, waiting for the release of Karla Homolka who raped, tortured and murdered teenage girls with her ex-husband Paul Bernado.
Hundreds of youths, many with faces daubed in war paint, run through the Kaiama village in Nigeria’s oil-rich delta, rallying to commemorate the death of a secessionist leader killed in the 1960s whom they see as a hero for today. Few had dared advocate the breakup of Nigeria since 1970, when the three-year Biafran civil war ended after causing over one million deaths.
Beatings and bullying have been taking place for years at the prison in western Russia where hundreds of prisoners have mutilated themselves in an unprecedented act of protest, former inmates said this week. Inmates at the prison began cutting their necks and stomachs with razor blades on the night of June 26-27 and 1 300 of them have since gone on hunger strike.
A R14,2-million "interim maintenance" project is in the planning stage for President Thabo Mbeki’s official Tshwane home of Mahlamba Ndlovu on the Bryntirion Estate, according to Minister of Public Works Stella Sigcau. Three ministerial homes are also to be built on the estate in the next two years.
Thousands of Kenyan families have been left homeless following a government decision to evict them, without compensation, from farms allegedly carved out of the Mau forest in Narok district, south-western Kenya. According to the Kenya Red Cross Society, between 20 000 and 30 000 people lost their homes.
Britain is painting a misleadingly flattering picture of its commitments to do more in the fight against poverty in Africa, a leading development group said on Tuesday. ”The British government is very good at PR, at spinning what really is going on,” said Peter Hardstaff from the World Development Movement.