After the inflation target was breached, the Reserve Bank was widely seen as justified in increasing interest rates early in June for the fifth time in a year. The question is less whether it should have done so, but whether we have chosen the correct inflation target.
George W Bush (approval rating: 29%) is used to being unpopular with the US electorate. But now he is even losing the support of the rightwingers in his party — and they’re showing their displeasure in dollars, not just percentage points. In the run-up to the last two American election campaigns, eager Republicans lined their party’s coffers by paying up to $25 000 to have the president pose for a picture with them at fundraising events.
Globalisation has reduced the bargaining power of unskilled workers and pushed up inequality in many Western countries, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said this week, urging governments to improve their social safety nets. The Paris-based rich nations club said in its annual Employment Outlook that the prospect of offshoring was likely to have increased the vulnerability of jobs.
Politically motivated shootings targeting government ministers and senior ruling-party officials continued to wreak havoc in the Lesotho capital, Maseru, this week. The most recent wave of attacks started on June 10, when armed men attacked bodyguards at three government ministers’ homes. Several days later opposition leader Tom Thabane’s house was attacked.
Another week of hearings at the banking inquiry of the Competition Commission; another bonanza for the lawyers. All the banks seem to have lawyers present at all the hearings, madly taking notes and looking very serious. The debate can degenerate into mind-numbing legalese, which is no doubt important in determining the legal framework of anti-competitive behaviour, writes Maya Fisher-French.
Betty was nine when her mother told her she would have to leave Nigeria and live with a family friend in the United Kingdom. The girl was sad to leave her five sisters and two brothers, but the family was poor, living in one room, taking turns to sleep on the only bed. In Britain, it seemed, Betty’s life would at least be easier. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Three years into Transnet’s turn-around, Maria Ramos has swapped her customary high heels for a pair of sturdier shoes, as financial and management restructuring gives way to an enormous operational overhaul of the rail, port, and pipelines businesses. The past fortnight has seen announcements about a better deal for pensioners, the R1,4-billion sale of the housing loan book to FNB, and the planned disposal of the Carlton Centre.
Since its launch just more than a decade ago, the al-Jazeera satellite TV station has transformed the politics of the Middle East. For the first time, people in the region had access to a genuinely free and independent source of news and comment that was neither under the control of dictatorial regimes nor of Western states or corporations.
What happens when one and a half million human beings are imprisoned in a tiny, arid territory, cut off from their compatriots and from any contact with the outside world, starved by an economic blockade and unable to feed their families? Some months ago, I described this situation as a sociological experiment set up by Israel, the United States and the European Union, writes Uri Avnery.
You’ve gone grey, a long-time friend said looking at me in embarrassment. Perhaps he thought I had gone grey overnight. Not so. My silver-grey head of hair was 20 years in the making. ”You should talk to Jenny; she does something to her hair every week,” he told me.