When John Young heard a radio interviewer ask whether a song was pastiche, he didn’t grab a dictionary. He typed an approximation into Google to get the word’s spelling and meaning. When Young, a design consultant in Whittier, California, gets new clients, he ”googles” them to see if they pay their bills.
In Britain, Billy Connolly is a national treasure. After breaking through as a stand-up comedian, the hirsute Scottish entertainer has gone on to star in numerous television specials, write bestselling books, make documentaries, record hit albums, and appear in a string of British-made films and television dramas. The <i>M&G</i> dispenses the Qs and Billy the As.
In July 2003 Lembede Investment Holdings, the African National Congress Youth League’s (ANCYL) investment company, was touted as the new 16,5% empowerment partner in property management company Rand Leases.
President Thabo Mbeki’s office received a number of death threats against the president earlier in the week, Afrikaans daily newspaper Beeld reported on Friday. The threatening calls were received a day after a former South African National Defence Force Major, George Makume, was shot dead outside former president Nelson Mandela’s Cape Town house.
Why are we in the Middle East? This is the real question that the Madrid bombs pose for Europe and the United States, and for the nations of that region themselves. The struggle in which we are all caught up is, ultimately, neither about Iraq nor about terrorism narrowly defined.
Microsoft is facing millions of euros in fines after failing to reach a settlement in its epic anti-monopoly battle with European regulators. Mario Monti, the EU competition commissioner, on Thursday announced that since talks had broken down the US software company would be subject to a precedent-setting ruling and financial penalties.
Spanish police arrested five more suspects in the Madrid train attack yesterday, with one reportedly believed to have been part of the team of six or more who planted the bombs that killed 202 commuters last week. The five men held on Thursday were said to be Moroccan or north African in origin, with one of them a Spanish national.
Nato rushed 1 000 extra peacekeepers, including 600 British troops, to Kosovo on Thursday amid fears that the worst day of ethnic violence between Albanians and Serbs since the 1999 war might lead to an explosion of pogroms and fighting in the region.
Pakistani forces were on Thursday night poised for a dawn assault on a mountain stronghold that officials in the capital, Islamabad, said could be the hideout of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s deputy leader. ”[Because of] the resistance being offered by the people there, we feel that there may be a high-value target,” President Pervez Musharraf told CNN television.
The World Bank has formally reopened a corruption inquiry into a leading Canadian engineering company which could lead to the first blacklisting of a major international firm. The move follows the conviction of Acres International in the high court of Lesotho, an unprecedented example of a Western firm being prosecuted for bribery by a developing country.