Dawn had yet to break and Baghdad’s biggest police station, like the rest of the city, was quiet. About 80 officers dozed inside the fortress, leaving just a few sentries guarding the walls, razor wire and concrete barriers. It started with mortars. A series of whooshes from north and south followed seconds later by explosions inside the perimeter.
South Africa and Malaysia focussed attention on the need to collectively promote fair global trade regimes and the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions at the first Malaysia-South Africa joint commission meeting held this week. The first commission meeting was held "in an atmosphere of friendship and co-operation", said Foreign Affairs department spokesperson Ronnie Mamoepa.
The South African labour market is bracing itself for a major showdown as more than 500Â 000 members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) gear up for massive protest action against job losses and high levels of unemployment. Cosatu’s strike will be South Africa’s biggest action against unemployment in 15 years.
Up to 900 000 people have been evacuated in southern China after the worst floods in almost a century killed more than 80 people and wreaked havoc on buildings and crops. With torrential rains forecast to continue until the weekend, the death toll is expected to rise, as is the economic cost, which is currently estimated at 1,7-billion yuan (-million).
The elderly Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced on Thursday to 60 years in prison for orchestrating the killing of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. Killen (80) showed no emotion as he was wheeled out of the courtroom in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in a yellow prison jumpsuit to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
The African National Congress (ANC) goes into its national general council meeting (NGC) next week facing a convergence of policy debates and leadership battles that is unprecedented in its decade-long rule. Unity — or the lack of it — is likely to colour the entire debate.
A more streamlined, technocratic ANC, with unruly regions and branches brought firmly under the control of Luthuli House, is at the centre of plans to align party structures with those of the government. But the plan is likely to face stiff resistance; some provincial leaders told the <i>Mail & Guardian</i> they have already resolved to contest it.
Being a grown-up doesn’t mean you’re too old to love the idea of living in a tree house. Knysna’s Phantom Forest Eco-Reserve offers the ultimate tree-house fantasy. Built overlooking the indigenous forest and an estuarine wetland, these elevated luxury tree-house suites offer the perfect weekend playground.
Some three billion years ago, planetary explosions saw stars fall from the sky into the oceans that flanked Godwanaland, the great land mass of our infant planet. Deep below the waves, the carbon of shattered stars merged with the Earth’s mantle to form hard crystalline diamonds.
Regulation cost South African firms R79-billion in 2004. This is the bottom-line result of Small Business Project’s pioneering study of regulatory compliance costs to the South African private sector, from large corporations through small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to the informal sector.