South Africans are very optimistic about regular income, according to the results of a MasterCard survey released on Thursday. The survey is the first-ever MasterIndex of consumer confidence conducted across the South Asia, Middle East and South Africa region.
South African producer prices for all commodities fell by 0,2% in the 12 months to the end of April from a 1,2% decline for the 12 months to the end of March, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) said on Thursday. On the month, the PPI was up 1%, compared with a 0,2% drop in March.
The government of Guinea has placed an embargo on all imports and exports by Anglogold Ashanti’s Siguiri mine, including the export of gold bullion and the import of diesel, the company said on Wednesday. ”Diesel fuel is urgently required in order to maintain critical pumps at the heap leach plant, without which there is a risk of cyanide discharges and environmental harm,” Anglogold said.
Several people with ”evil intentions” were arrested in South Africa five days before the elections last month, leading to the arrests of al-Qaeda suspects internationally, The Star newspaper reported on Thursday. The South African operation sparked arrests of suspects linked to al-Qaeda in Jordan, Syria and Britain, Selebi said.
China offered the world a lesson in how to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty on Wednesday at an international conference which underlined its emergence as a powerful alternative to the western model of development. Since opening its economy in 1978, China has accounted for three-quarters of all the people in the world lifted out of abject poverty.
A political row brewed in Malaysia on Thursday over claims that the government is partially funding the construction of a lavish ,9-million (R58-million) mansion for Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. Mugabe, in a recent interview with Britain’s Sky News television, denied that the 25-bedroom mansion near Harare was being financed by Zimbabwean taxpayers, saying the Malaysian and Chinese governments were providing partial funding.
United States scientists are preparing to perform the world’s first full-face transplant. The 24-hour operation involves lifting an entire face from a dead donor — including nose cartilage, nerves and muscles — and transferring them to someone hideously disfigured by burns or other injuries.
In March 1991, after more than 10 years of being locked up by Saddam Hussein, a small, bearded figure escaped from his cell. He was Iraq’s most famous nuclear scientist. Helped by the man who brought him his food, Hussain al-Shahristani jumped into a car used by the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s feared secret intelligence agency, and drove out of Abu Ghraib prison.
Britain denies rift with US over Iraq
Last weekend I flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town on South African Airways, and I can recommend the experience to anyone. If you are a lobotomised deaf-blind dwarf with a stapled stomach, it is a marvellous way to spend two hours. It has become passé to complain about airlines and their tenuous grasp of anatomical realities, but somewhere over Kimberley I began to fantasise about kicking an SAA executive in the shin until he cried.
The past two or three weeks have been filled with the thrill of discovery. It has taken no more than the reading of a few popular newspapers, the watching of a few local television news broadcasts, the listening to of a few radio talk shows. I now see how easy it is to achieve what so many think is unattainable personal glory and riches, fame and desirability.