The most heroic figures of last week were the astronauts crawling around the edge of the space shuttle to repair the craft in which they must return to the Earth 400km below. It’s an extraordinary testament to the defeated and sunless mood that we seem to be in that this was treated everywhere as a defeat.
Whatever happened to the cast-iron principle that high oil prices are bad for the stock market? A day after oil touched -per-barrel, the FTSE 100 (the index of top 100 British companies) recorded another three-year high on Tuesday. The FTSE 250 index, supposedly a broader measure of the health of corporate Britain, is doing even better, hitting all-time highs.
The Botswana government continues to sustain substantial public relations damage in the legal battle being waged against it by the San people it displaced from their ancestral home in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Recently, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous People said the government should have consulted the San before moving them.
Not every woman is an affirmative action appointment or candidate. Neither is every black person. Take Maria Ramos, the chief executive of Transnet. She has been the only post–apartheid boss of the transport parastatal with a clear strategic sense of what needed to be fixed.
In less than five years, what started out as a small side project with a budget of a few thousand dollars has grown into one of the web’s greatest success stories. Wikipedia, the open, editable encyclopedia, and its sister projects have gone from absolutely nothing to 22-million entries in less than half a decade.
The Mail & Guardian stopped just short of buying two tame cheetahs for a ”canned” hunt this week. The deal came to an end when we refused to fork out about R100 000 and failed to produce a letter from a European embassy approving the export of the cheetahs’ heads.
Click on image for full-size view.
Embattled South African Rugby Union (SARU) president Brian van Rooyen will face new questions at a president’s council meeting on Friday over his leadership style, following the resignation of Saru deputy president André Markgraaff. Markgraaff quit in an apparent power struggle over who holds the strings of Springbok coach Jake White.
The nationwide strike at South African gold mines is over, the Chamber of Mines said on Thursday. A spokesperson said the National Union of Mineworkers and Solidarity trade union have accepted an offer of a pay increase of between 6% and 7%. The agreement covers two years and the minimum increase for the second year must be 5,5%.
Israel’s military on Thursday banned visitors from Gaza Strip settlements to try to stop the influx of pull-out protesters who plan to reinforce settler resistance to their evacuation. Police estimate that 2 000 opponents have sneaked into Gaza to back the 8 500 settlers, but settler leaders put the number at 5 000.