Growth in demand for credit from South Africa’s private sector slowed marginally to 24,84% year-on-year in May, data showed on Friday, easing slightly pressure for more interest-rate increases. Private-sector credit extension slowed from 25,08% year-on-year in April, the South African Reserve Bank said, below forecasts of a 25,6% rise.
If you were to stop someone you know and ask them to give you a list of all their friends — together with their friends’ friends, complete with their special interests — you would be dismissed as strange, if not bizarre. Yet that is what is happening voluntarily with the seemingly unstoppable expansion of social websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook.
Nigeria’s President Umaru Yar’Adua declared about -million in personal assets on Thursday, saying public financial disclosures should be standard practice as his country battles to curb official corruption. Yar’Adua took power on May 29 with a promise to fight graft in one of the world’s most corrupt nations.
British police defused a bomb in a parked car in London’s theatre district on Friday and launched a counter-terrorism investigation. Sky News quoted unidentified sources as saying the bomb was ”potentially massive”. The bomb was found hours after new Prime Minister Gordon Brown named his Cabinet.
Pakistani police fired tear gas on Friday to break up a protest by angry cyclone survivors as rescuers struggled to reach communities cut off by floods affecting 900 000 people. Meanwhile, in India, tens of thousands of people fled an approaching storm.
On Thursday, the South African Football Association’s (Safa) vice-president and chairperson of the national association’s tottering SA Football subsidiary, Chief Mwelo Nonkonyana, laid charges with the police against former SA Football CEO Sbu Mngadi over alleged forgery and misappropriation of funds.
An anti-gay Ugandan Cabinet minister vowed on Friday to continue to fight homosexuality in his country despite his claim that he receives daily hate mail from gay people around the world. ”The mail is from outside not from Uganda and I receive these mails every day,” Ethics and Integrity Minister James Nsaba Buturo said.
Did the release of Paris Hilton from a Los Angeles jail merit the media attention it received? That question reached a critical point for one United States cable news presenter when she refused to read out the lead item on a popular morning breakfast show. She tore up her script, tried to set light to it and finally put it through a shredder.
The Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was under pressure to perform a U-turn on petrol rationing on Thursday after the restriction prompted violent protests at filling stations across the country this week. MPs said they would press the government to alter or even scrap the plan.
South African banks, which account for the majority of loans issued, may have no idea how deeply indebted their customers are, Business Report said on Friday. Unisa’s Bureau for Market Research has conducted a study on the extent of indebtedness on behalf of one of the banks.