South Africa’s ”buy South Africa campaign”, Proudly South African (PSA), is floundering. Hundreds of disillusioned members have withdrawn their annual subscription fees, key staff members have resigned and revenue from founding sponsors has run dry. The PSA campaign flowed from the Presidential Job Summit in 1998.
Middlesbrough had probably better not bet on coming back from 3-0 down to beat Sevilla in the Uefa Cup final. Basle and Steaua Bucharest might have succumbed to the Riverside onslaught, but the Spanish side have demonstrated in their progress towards Thursday’s final in Eindhoven that they are made of sterner stuff.
The JSE was at an all-time high in midday trade on Friday as commodity prices continued to firm, with gold rising to yet another 25-year-high and copper prices also rising strongly. A moderately weaker rand was also helping to support the market.
The momentum in the gold price continues and the gold market seems set for a sustained positive cycle, world number three gold miner AngloGold Ashanti said on Friday. On Friday morning, gold climbed to $682,15 a troy ounce — its highest level since October 1980 when gold fixed at a high of $690/oz.
The proclamation and expropriation of land for the Gautrain Project has begun, the Gauteng Provincial Government said in a statement late on Thursday. The proclamation of properties needed for the first phases of construction will be published in the <i>Provincial Gazette</i> on Friday.
Instantly supplanting the War of Jenkins’s Ear as history’s most depressing conflict about a body part is the War of Rooney’s Foot, currently being waged between Sir Alex Ferguson and Sven-Goran Eriksson. Yet as they fiddle, the rest of us get on with the real business: whom to burn for The End of the Dream.
The extreme right British National Party (BNP) on Friday was celebrating a rise in support in local elections across Britain, saying it showed that voters were fed up with immigrants and asylum seekers. Eleven out of 13 BNP candidates put forward in Barking and Dagenham, a constituency east of London, won seats with one more ward still to declare.
The humanitarian disaster unfolding in Darfur was due to receive its most prominent exposure so far on American television on Thursday night. But it says much about the interface between politics and celebrity that the coverage was not to be found on any of the three main evening news broadcasts, which have devoted only 10 minutes to the crisis between them since the start of the year.
Body Shop, the self-styled ethical retailer that is currently being taken over by French cosmetics giant L’Oreal, reported on Friday a 5% increase in annual pre-tax profits. Profit before tax rose to £37,6-million during its 2005/2006 financial year, compared with £35,7-million previously.
With a final curse on his lips, Zacarias Moussaoui, the only man held accountable on US soil for the September 11 2001 terror attacks, was led from a courtroom on Thursday to spend the rest of his days in solitary confinement in a super-maximum security prison in Colorado.