A new brand of the government’s free condoms, featuring bright blue and yellow packaging, was unveiled by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on Monday. She said the latest trademarked brand, called Choice, replaced the one with the dull grey colour cover and was aimed at making condoms more appealing and desirable.
Activists on Sunday called for a comprehensive audit of Africa’s crippling debt burden, currently estimated at more than $300-billion. The call was made by representatives of social movements from ten African countries, as well as Brazil, Argentina and the Philippines, at the end of a three-day workshop held in Cape Town
A landmine planted by suspected Maoist rebels in Nepal killed 21 policemen and injured 16 others on Monday as a top guerrilla rejected calls by the prime minister to reopen peace talks.The policemen were on a search mission for Maoist hideouts in the insurgency-torn southwestern Nepalgunj district when their truck was blown up by underground explosives, police said.
”Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” So begins June 16, 1904, the day on which James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses is set. One hundred years on Ireland is marking the anniversary with a five-month-long, 50-event festival.
On average South African workers would have to toil for 111 years to match what their bosses earn in just one year. While the salaries of the country’s business heavyweights have skyrocketed over the past 10 years, their workers’ wages have hit record lows — a trend that spells out a grim future for tackling South Africa’s soaring unemployment levels.
Although the South African government had not envisaged any initial public offerings (IPOs) from state-owned enterprises for the current financial year, it would consider IPOs where appropriate in the future, while concentrating on concessions, joint ventures and public-private partnership arrangements, according to Minister of Public Enterprises Alec Erwin.
France and Israel are set to sign their biggest defence deal in decades which will see the state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries transfer its know-how for the manufacture of military drones. The deal, worth between and -million, will be signed during the Eurosatory 2004 international exhibition for land and land-air defence that opens on Monday in Villepinte, north of Paris.
Good news for motorists is that the price of fuel could drop by as much as 20 cents per litre in July, the Department of Minerals and Energy said on Monday. ”We have a big over-recovery at the moment, so the trend is downwards,” said Hein Baak, spokesperson for the department.
The past is never dead, wrote William Faulkner, the American south’s most famous literary son. ”It’s not even past.” And so on Saturday in Greensboro, North Carolina, a truth and reconciliation commission started the painful process of revisiting a bloody episode in the town’s history in the hope that it can make more sense of the present.
The climbing roses were in full bloom at the bomb-makers’ house near the town of Chinchón on Sunday, creeping over the porch from a garden now overrun by grass, bright red poppies and clusters of daisies. It is an innocent-looking place, tucked away among vineyards and olive groves on a dusty lane dotted with similar weekend homes, many of them surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire.