The JSE Securities Exchange powered into the new year on a record high, picking up from where it left off last year. On Tuesday the FTSE/JSE Africa all share index reached 12 784,34 points, the latest in a series of records that have been displaced since October. Tuesday’s performance took place in a relatively thin trading volume, with turnover at roughly R1,5-billon.
The absurd drama of matric continues. And the release of the results every festive season is an exceptionally long-running government production that by now rivals an Andrew Lloyd Webber blockbuster. For the next three years, the country as a whole — and thousands of pupils, teachers and parents in particular — will sweat through the matric endurance test.
The tsunami triggered by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean that struck the Horn of Africa coastline on December 26 has affected about 18 000 households of varying sizes in Somalia, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. Many of those affected were living in small villages along the Somali coastline, particularly in the north-eastern regions. Their lives were devastated by the waves.
In the crowded wards of African hospitals, coughs and bony bodies tell the story of a deadly return. Tuberculosis (TB), supposedly defeated 40 years ago, is back, riding on the Aids epidemic, and the world is ill-prepared, says the relief agency Médécins sans Frontières (MSF). TB kills two million people every year, nearly all in developing countries. Yet TB is curable.
Scorecards, compactly final, insist that cricket matches are singular events. Results imply a beginning, a middle and an end. Match reports enforce closure. Test matches begin (the dailies imply) in order to finish. But the weekly commentator, cut adrift from this headlong rush, has the opportunity to play truant.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned Jewish settlers on Wednesday that he will use all the government’s power against anyone who resists his planned withdrawal from Gaza and the granting of a token part of the West Bank. His comment came after an angry confrontation between settlers and the Israeli army in which the police helped to remove two settler outposts at Shalhevet in the hard line Yizhar settlement on the West Bank.
The world looks beautiful from the summit of the Premier Soccer League table for Orlando Pirates as they survey all around them at this stage of the season. For Pirates, their 13-game unbeaten run in the Premier Soccer League has raised hopes of wrestling the championship title from arch-rivals Kaizer Chiefs.
As the clear-up from the Asian tsunami starts and the full damage is assessed, there is growing consensus among scientists, environmentalists and Asian fishing communities that the impact was considerably worsened by tourist, shrimp farm and other industrial developments that have destroyed or degraded mangrove forests and other natural sea defences.
The Football League has volunteered to be used as a ”guinea pig” for goal line technology that, if successful, could be implemented throughout the world. Rather than video evidence, the scheme would involve using a specially created ball fitted with a microchip that bleeps whenever it crosses the line.
There cannot be many babies named after disasters, but then there cannot be many babies that nature has thrown so totally on the comfort of strangers as 20-day-old Wave. In his short life, the Thai boy has escaped a tsunami that appears to have killed his parents and the poverty that forced his carer to abandon him three days later.