While changes in the rand-dollar exchange rate has increased the cost of living in South Africa, Johannesburg and Pretoria remain cheaper places to live than most Western and Asian cities. The finding was based on the results of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) worldwide cost of living bi-annual survey.
The Brazilian police said on Tuesday that the country’s footballers were the target of a sophisticated extortion ring, after armed kidnappers snatched the mother of an overseas player: the second such abduction in a month. The local police said on Tuesday that they were still waiting for the kidnappers to make contact.
On the neo-Nazi websites where the teenage loner aired his admiration for Adolf Hitler’s notions of ethnic purity, he was known as Todesengel — German for Angel of Death. Late on Monday, in a secluded Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, he played out those dark fantasies.
The days of cheap treatments for millions of Aids patients around the world are coming to an end, health agencies warned on Tuesday night, after the Indian Parliament passed a Bill that makes it illegal to copy patented drugs. The practice of copying patented drugs has made medicines affordable for patients around the world.
Journalists are the self-appointed custodians of the pot of public sympathy and they guard its apportionment jealously. To the good and virtuous they dole out rich, nourishing platefuls of comfort; to the undeserving, a grudging and watery dilution of feeling. Consider the very different treatment meted out by the media to Leigh Matthews and Annemarie Engelbrecht.
"Glorified secondary schools" is the derisive term coined by Nigerians to describe their country’s universities. Classrooms are overcrowded, with students sitting on the floor during lectures. Libraries lack books, and laboratories are ill-equipped to conduct experiments. And, just as facilities are decaying, so is the quality of education being received by students.
Five South Africans were last month invited to address the first international conference on Restorative Justice and Peace in Colombia: Albie Sachs, Tutu, Penuell Maduna, Tokyo Sexwale and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. "One could say we were in Colombia as ambassadors of South Africa’s peaceful transition," writes Gobodo-Madikizela.
Five years ago, investors were told there was unlimited money to be made out of the dotcom revolution — and that was true, until the point where there were no longer more buyers than sellers. The market reached that point in March 2000 and, since then, the Nasdaq has lost 60% of its value and millions of small investors have suffered.
South Africa may have a special role to play in the global search for what one might call the ”decent economy”. But if we are to achieve this — stage two if you like of the revolution of which so many have dreamed in the long march to freedom — it is necessary to examine unflinchingly what we have and have not achieved since 1994.
”It’s all porn,” a colleague said. He was reacting to the Patricia Lewis skande. ”It doesn’t really make a difference if it’s hard or soft.” We’d seen the morning headlines, and this time the news was huge. This was not just a catfight with market rival Amor Vittone. Nor just news that she was pregnant and capable of breeding.