As children, we soon learned, it was different for boys. While they had Superman, Desperate Dan, a legion of Bash Street Kids and the Hardy Boys, for girls, sturdy female heroes were thin on the ground. The pages of Bunty were riddled with ladies who swooned, and simpering boarding-school girls who dreamed of ponies, while on television women were always assistants, love interests or girls who got the collywobbles at the sight of a ghost or a spider.
Sajida Khan (55) died in her home on Sunday night, during a second bout of cancer caused — she was convinced — by Durban’s largest dump. The Bisasar Road site, which handles most of the city’s rubbish, was placed directly across the street from her home in Clare Estate in 1980.
Motorists can be expected to pay more for fuel soon as crude prices soared again to nearly $77 a barrel. Turmoil in the international oil markets — due to strong demand, geopolitical instability and a shortage of refining capacity — will put further upward pressure on forecourt prices.
Two toddlers sit on a rusting grille platform built on bamboo stilts at the entrance to one of Bangladesh’s fastest-growing housing developments. Three feet below them lies a festering mound of rubbish, into which a gushing waste pipe from a nearby factory discharges. Beyond them are rows and rows of windowless, airless, corrugated iron rooms, stacked on top of each other like chicken coops.
Philomena Appiah’s factory is the surprising source of thousands of American uniforms and workwear items, tailored by Ghanaian seamstresses and shipped across the Atlantic to stores in the United States as part of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa).
Last week France and Germany abandoned the dual-nationality management structure at Eads, the owner of Airbus, in an attempt to turn the struggling aerospace and defence group into a "normal" global company. The move will bring an end to the strife that has crippled the group for the past two years.
Africa’s east coast could go from having no undersea broadband cables to four. The planned East Africa Submarine System, touted as the solution for the bandwidth-starved continent, has been plagued by political squabbles that have resulted in it splintering into four mooted cable projects.
There has been a ruckus recently because Discovery Health Medical Scheme has continued to fail to meet its 25% solvency ratio required by law. The question Discovery Health members are asking is: are their benefits safe? Can Discovery Health meet member claims?
Those involved in peace and in anti-conscription movements during apartheid, are mourning the loss of peace activist Nan Cross, who died last weekend aged 79. Her religion and her pacifist sentiments meant that her contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle centred on conscientious objection.
”If you remove the South African context, BEE is really about a company being a responsible citizen in the environment in which it operates,” says Andile Tlhoaele. ”In South Africa, we incentivise you for doing that.” Tlhoaele, the chief executive of verification agency Inforcomm, a director of the Association of BEE Verification Agencies and a member of the ICT Charter steering committee, is unsurprisingly bullish on BEE.