You have to be careful of cool. It’s trickier than it looks. Ask people for cool companies, and they rattle off companies with cool ads. But there must be more to it than ads. I don’t want to call a company ”cool” on the strength of its lipstick; I want to know it has heart. Does it do decent by staff and clients, or is it stuck in ancient 20th century gladiator mode? Ease, attitude and tone is what South Africa’s low-fare airline sells.

Faced with mounting civic pressure to relieve the burden of school fees, government moved last week to increase both access to schools and redress of gross apartheid racial inequalities in education provision. But the leading trade union in the sector — the South African Democratic Teachers Union — said the proposals needed to go much deeper to make a significant impact.

The militant group led by the Jordanian extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi signalled a fresh escalation of the Iraq insurgency crisis on Sunday night by claiming responsibility for the massacre of about 50 members of the national guard found dead on a remote road in eastern Iraq.

Israel’s Parliament will on Monday begin debating bitterly opposed legislation to remove Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip next year ahead of a vote that could force a major realignment of Israeli politics. The crisis lays the ground for coalition negotiations between Likud and Labour, although the bodies of both parties are against it.

Thousands of people were facing a second night in emergency shelters or out in the open on Sunday after the deadliest earthquake to strike Japan in nine years left at least 21 people dead and more than 1 800 injured. A series of earthquakes measuring up to 6,8 on the Richter scale caused widespread damage on Saturday evening in Niigata prefecture.