The Israeli army said on Friday it was investigating the alleged use by soldiers of Palestinian civilians as human shields during a recent operation in the West Bank town of Nablus. In October 2005, Israel’s supreme court banned the use of human shields as being contrary to international law.
If you were walking recently on a beach in Puerto Rico and saw a strange web address scrawled along the sand, or if you saw balloons released from a window in Chicago with similar hieroglyphics, then they can almost certainly be traced to something written on a napkin and left in an Oxford café by an undergraduate.
It’s a kind of social networking site, and it is generating huge amounts of buzz among the web’s early adopters thanks to a simple conceit. All <i>Twitter.com</i> does is ask: "What are you doing?" The idea is that it offers a way for individuals to provide more detailed status updates to their friends, family and contacts.
<a href="http://www.mg.co.za/specialreport.aspx?area=cwc_home"><img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/300732/Icon_CWC.gif" align=left border=0></a>That is what hosting the 2003 Cricket World Cup taught us. Forearmed with this charitable knowledge, those insomniacs who watched Sunday night’s jubilation in Montego Bay would have forgiven the West Indian organisers, and elected to believe the reports of those who were actually there who said that it was quite a shindig.
The world’s third- and sixth-largest beer producers nudged one another recently, the immediate fallout being that Amstel drinkers may have to switch brands, at least for a couple of months. SABMiller has been brewing Amstel for 40 years, but the brewery announced recently that it has stopped production of the premium beer brand.
Can it be that black economic empowerment (BEE), coupled with affirmative action, is retarding African entrepreneurship — and ironically spurring white people to take the plunge into running their own businesses? Let’s be clear that entrepreneurship here entails innovation and risk-taking and contributes to economic development rather than being simply the art of spotting a gap, writes Reg Rumney.
If God wills, even a broomstick will shoot. That is an old Yiddish adage. One could add now: If God wills, even Ehud Olmert can sometimes tell the truth. The truth, according to the Israeli prime minister’s testimony before the Winograd commission of inquiry into the war in Lebanon, which was leaked to the media recently, is that this was not a spontaneous reaction to the capture of the two Israeli soldiers, but a war planned a long time ago.
Five broadband internet providers are competing for a share of the South African market, but the benefits of the price war are cold comfort for consumers who still face an uphill battle in deciphering the different broadband options on offer. Even when you find the option that suits you best, you might just be buying a lemon.
In January, during an interview, Mark Wurr, head of trading for Global Trader, said: "What this market needs is a nice 10% to 15% clean-out. A nice sell-off would bring foreigners back into the market." Traders love volatility and Wurr is seeing quite a shake-up at the moment, with the markets all over the place as data from the United States housing market sent shockwaves across the world this week.
Sometimes I wonder if the fitness industry is secretly having a laugh at our expense. I wonder whether the big-wigs of the gym world sit on exercise bikes in some glossy aerobics studio, brainstorming the most outlandish ideas for new fitness crazes that will leave us looking as ludicrous as possible.