Chaos erupted in Umtata on Wednesday when police used teargas and rubber bullets to forcibly evict students from the Eastern Cape Technikon. Police took action after an hour-long standoff with a group of students who stood at the main entrance of the institution refusing to leave the premises.
Three European countries scrambled fighters to intercept a Spanish airliner that flew for hundreds of kilometres without responding to control tower messages, raising the fear that it had been hijacked, airline sources confirmed on Wednesday. The scare on May 1 ended when the chief cabin attendant in the airliner looked out of a window and saw two French fighters.
Heavy overnight United States bombardment of Kut has killed 56 people and wounded more than 110, one day after clashes between police and Shi’ite Muslim militiamen in the southern Iraqi city, a medic said on Thursday. ”American planes started bombing the al-Shakia district, in southern Kut after 3am,” said Kut hospital director, Khader Fadal Arar. He said many of the dead and wounded were women and children.
Waiting for martyrdom
In a dirty alley on the outskirts of the old city of Najaf on Wednesday stood a crowd of militia fighters — the newest volunteer among them a bright young biology student called Ali. He arrived seven days ago, bringing his Kalashnikov and a willingness to fight for the radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Around his head he wore a green, silk bandanna — an emblem of martyrdom.
56 killed, 110 wounded in US bombing
The owner of the website www.hellkom.co.za on Thursday confirmed that he had received a letter from Telkom’s attorneys threatening to sue him for R5-million, if the website isn’t closed by Friday. Webmaster Gregg Stirton said the high cost and low quality of Telkom’s telecommunication services was hampering South Africa’s economic growth potential.
Are you considering doing an MBA, but confused about the mass of information out there – including the number of such degrees and how they compare? Especially following the Council on Higher Education’s accreditation exercise, these questions are acute. A new website now sets out to offer all you might need to know.
To edit a collection of articles that seek not simply to review but also to offer an analysis of education change and developments in South Africa over the past decade is no easy task. Linda Chisholm has succeeded in doing this with remarkable finesse.
Over the past decade, South Africa has given up an astonishing number of stories about its dark past. Some places, we can be sure, will never reveal their pasts except, perhaps, in the novels that remain to be written. One place where stories have still to be told and which will not wait for the novels are South Africa’s universities. The links between political power and organised forms of knowledge come into focus at a Rhodes University conference this month.
Sustainable economic development is dependent on an increasing supply of highly skilled people. Participation rates are an indicator of such a supply. Participation rates refer to the percentage of students who continue their studies after passing grade 12 – that is, students studying at higher education institutions as a percentage of students passing grade 12.
Sustainable economic development is now seen as the point of departure for all national strategic planning processes and has become a national priority in South Africa. And the new "universities of technology" are best equipped to deal with South Africa’s skills shortage, argues Dénis van Rensburg.