The South African labour market is bracing itself for countrywide strikes as disputes between the government and major unions over teachers’ salaries and the working conditions of prison warders reach boiling point. The South African Democratic Teachers Union has withdrawn its threat to strike next week as schools reopen in several provinces, but has threatened imminent industrial action if its grievances are not addressed.
Not the Mail & Guardian is Robert Kirby’s startling and savagely satirical parody of the Mail & Guardian newspaper. Any similarity between real people and characters portrayed here is anything but coincidental Schumacher looks for new challenge: Seven times formula one world champion Michael Schumacher has quit Ferrari for Minardi. Said Schumacher: ‘Minardi have made […]
Zimbabwe will host the 2012 Olympics or die trying. This was the word this week from President Robert Mugabe, as he officially endorsed his country’s bid to host the sporting spectacle.
The Department of Sport and Recreation, in collaboration with a leading pet food manufacturer, has announced that legislation to legalise greyhound racing will be introduced during the next parliamentary session.
The Sky News “Hijack Live” box was disappointingly immobile. As Rupert Murdoch fed the informational equivalent of white sugar to England’s lowest common denominator on his news channel, the picture-in-a-window resolutely refused to show anything resembling what broadcasters were calling “drama”. After 10 minutes a policeman had walked past, and the rolling billboard behind the bus on the dim Athenian street had changed 10 times.
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.