About 15 000 people demonstrated at the weekend in Angola’s restive oil-rich Cabinda region to demand a truce between government forces and separatists fighting Luanda for about four decades. Shouting ”We want peace”, the demonstrators on Sunday took to the streets of the Cabinda capital.
The JSE Securities Exchange South Africa (JSE) was a tad higher in noon trade in a market that, as is typical on a Monday, was very quiet. A dealer said that there was no fresh news to drive the bourse and that most of the moves were stock specific. By 11.54am, the all share index was up 0,28%.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan says that peace talks for southern Sudan may be compromised if mediators continue to turn a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis raging in the western region of Darfur, where more than a million people have been displaced by fighting.
Laurance Rockefeller, a conservationist, philanthropist and leading figure in the field of venture capital, died in his sleep on Sunday morning. He was 94. The cause of death was pulmonary fibrosis, his spokesperson said in a statement. Rockefeller was number 377 on this year’s Forbes magazine list of 587 billionaires, with ,5-billion.
The air over the Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge in the United States this time of year is usually filled with the grunts and squawks of thousands of white pelicans and their chicks. The giant birds have made the refuge their home for at least 100 years. Now their nesting grounds are quiet. The pelicans are gone — and no one knows why.
The recently announced review of regulations hampering small business must include input from business, the Centre for Development Enterprise (CDE) said on Monday. The organisation said a new CDE report confirms that the government’s support for entrepreneurship in South Africa has been largely misdirected
The De Beers diamond group of South Africa, the world’s largest supplier of rough diamonds, has agreed to plead guilty to price-fixing charges and is now set to return to the United States market after an absence of 60 years, the Financial Times reported on Monday.
Trade ministers from African, Caribbean and Pacific countries worked on Saturday to hammer out a joint position on global trade to protect their mainly agriculture-based economies in hardball negotiations with the world’s most powerful nations. The one-day meet took place in the northern resort town of Grand Bay in Mauritius.
Seventeen-year-old Francine Walkenshaw tried to go back to school last year, but gave up when better-dressed pupils jeered at her: ”Why do you live like a squatter? What did you do wrong?” Francine, her father Casper and her two brothers live in Lochvaal Emfuleni, on the outskirts of Vanderbijlpark on the Sasolburg road. It is one of at least three white squatter camps that have sprouted in the Vaal Triangle.
It’s 5.15pm on a weekday, and I’m in a minibus taxi travelling along Louis Botha Avenue through Orange Grove, Johannesburg, when a group of policemen pulls us over. I ask the woman sitting alongside me what’s going on. ”They are looking for illegals,” she whispers conspiratorially. With our police force seemingly preoccupied with illegal immigrants, we may be more at risk from the home team.