Israel on Sunday massed thousands of troops along the border of the Gaza Strip and warned that it would invade unless the Palestinian Authority acted to prevent the firing of missiles at Israeli towns. Israeli officials said more than 100 missiles had been fired from Gaza at Israeli targets in and outside the Gaza Strip.
The smell of scorched diesel was still discernible on the waterfront at Kusadasi on Sunday, though the road where the minibus exploded had been strewn with red and white carnations. The mid-morning blast in the popular Aegean resort — possibly the work of a suicide bomber — killed a British woman, an Irish holidaymaker and three Turks.
The secret of Harry Potter’s success lies in the continuing allure of magic and fantasy in a secular society. Gorgeous as all these playful encounters between angels and witches, shamans and talking animals clearly are, the heavy hand of prophecy always drives the most popular of these recent fantasy worlds.
A new advertising campaign aimed at curtailing teenage HIV rates by promoting abstinence is using a combination of traditional and modern values in its appeal to Swazi youth. The SiSwati phrase "<i>Ngoba likusasa nelami</i> [because tomorrow is mine]" has been chosen as the theme of the initiative, which got under way with full-page advertisements in Swaziland’s two national newspapers.
The taxi industry is organised along Mafia lines, with powerful, barely accountable associations collecting massive levies to fund war chests and pay for members’ funerals, a commission of inquiry in Cape Town has heard. The probe into the underlying causes of instability and violence in the Cape Town taxi industry was set up in May after clashes over routes to the newly opened Cape Gateway Mall.
We have all heard of "shack chic", "shabby chic" and "township chic". But how about "shit chic"? In the rural townships between Polokwane and Tzaneen in Limpopo, people are decorating their long drops (pit toilets) in highly expressive and individual ways, despite obviously limited resources.
To see (and hear) Bernie Baatjies and his circle of friends slapping down the pack of cards one by one in a game of klaberjas on a small table in an upmarket restaurant in the strangely rebirthing, formerly deeply Jewish Johannesburg suburb of Norwood, you would not think that you were that far from a mixed sidewalk gang of tsotsis.
"Before the start of the summer rainy season, the Klaserie river is more a lush reed bed than a body of moving water, although it retains a number of permanent pools. Early one overcast morning, I had the privilege of being the sole companion of wilderness guide Alan McSmith on a long, meandering walk through the dry Klaserie bush", writes Maureen Brady.
An unusually broad coalition of 12 United States environmental and public-interest groups launched a national boycott on Tuesday of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, for undermining efforts to combat global warming and lobbying Congress to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling.
It has been long time coming — but even now that it is here, the real work of implementing career-path mapping and incentive schemes for teachers is only just beginning. The R6,9-billion that was recently allocated for teachers’ salaries will be spent over three years. Of this, R2,7-billion will be used to settle backlogs in salary payments.