ZIMBABWE’s foreign payment arrears have climbed to at least $350-million dollars, raising the prospect of a default on its external debt and further fuel shortages, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. It said the deficit relates to payments for goods already dispatched to Zimbabwe and for orders not yet sent. Citing bankers it added that […]
A legal battle over a genetically modified rodent is putting the lucrative mutant mouse industry under the microscope James Meek In October a jury in San Francisco will make a decision in one of the new millennium’s most bizarre and complex court cases. Teams of elite lawyers will have spent weeks studying and arguing over […]
Mary Dover Picture the scene: you’ve just arrived at your four-star holiday hotel to find the paint peeling off the walls, the room smelling dank and pubic hairs in the bath. Not quite what the brochure promised but what recourse do you have now that the star system is redundant? Most of us have grown […]
Jaspreet Kindra Two tribes near Louis Trichardt have been invading state-run bluegum plantations after failing to push through an official claim to the land. After their claim to their ancestral land – located atop the bluegum-covered Rivola mountain – fell on deaf years, the Shangaan and Venda-speaking communities inhabiting either side of the mountain decided […]
Heather Hogan Two of the four banks operating in Yeoville are leaving because of crime and a lack of investment from local businesses, increasing the isolation of the already struggling suburb and its various communities. Nedbank is closing its Yeoville branch on May 31 and Standard Bank will follow on June 9, leaving residents and […]
Neil Thomas TAKING STOCK Sentiment is a strange thing. When warm and positive it can inspire people to great heights. When negative, it can easily result in doubt and destruction. It’s also hard to measure, at least in any rational way. That’s what makes it so difficult to try and second-guess the international investment community’s […]
Eight years ago a group of businesspeople hired a whale crier and forever changed the state of tourism in Hermanus Andrew McUtchen When Pieter Claasen first lifted a horn- shaped strand of kelp from the sand, and sounded a resonant bass note to the cliffs of Grotto beach, his audience could hardly have been more […]
The sole tourist venture permitted in Namibia’s normally arid Skeleton Coast has just opened for business Angus Begg ‘Remember to paddle when the waters reach us,” said Hunter Davies, noted English columnist and author of 40 books. He was seated in his bed in the dining room of a rather upmarket tented camp on Namibia’s […]
Hypertext has had a huge effect on creative writing, pushing it to places it has been trying to go for decades Karlin Lillington When Apple decided to supply a copy of a little program called Hypercard on all Macintosh computers back in the 1980s, it prepared the way for what would become the Web’s most […]
world Mercedes Sayagues President Robert Gabriel Mugabe this week articulated his vision of Zimbabwe in the new millennium: one redolent with the stale air of Albania under the paranoid Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist who led his country into extreme isolation and penury during the Cold War – a country cut off from the rest of […]