Poverty presents several faces. There is the face puckered by financial hardship — contorted and reconfigured, life’s stress-fractures — and the face reflecting not so much despair but a loss of hope. This is the face of many women farm workers on the bountiful wine estates of the Western Cape.
A coalition of female traditional leaders in South Africa are implementing a groundbreaking approach towards improving the lives of rural communities’ development through the management of indigenous knowledge systems and sustainable exploitation of natural resources with nutritional and medicinal values.
Saturday was the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The nuclear powers were commemorating it in their own special way: by seeking to ensure that the experiment is repeated. Columnist Robin Cook pointed out recently that the British government appears to have decided to replace its Trident nuclear weapons, without consulting Parliament or informing the public.
Convicted of aspiring to overthrow the government, sentenced to 10 years imprisonment on Robben Island, sacked from Parliament by Mbeki and accused of corruption while in office — we take a look at the key events in Jacob Zuma’s chequered past.
”People who don’t know me see this stylishly dressed young woman driving a nice car, and they think, ”Isn’t she lucky? She has a rich man as a lover to give her things”’, says Angela Shabalala as she manoeuvres her blue BMW sedan on to a highway leading to the Swazi capital, Mbabane. In fact, the 27-year-old bank employee used her own salary to buy the car, as well as her dresses and chic hairstyle.
”It’s a sad, sad story,” said the waiter from Pekoe View, a restaurant and curio shop overlooking Sapekoe Tea Estates, South Africa’s largest tea producer, which closed in December last year. He pointed to the slopes below where hundreds of acres of tea bushes have been left to grow wild and woolly. ”We used to get three or four busloads of visitors a week, now we get only a few people a month.”
A recent British Equal Opportunities Commission survey found that four out of five working men would be happy to swap their jobs for the role of main child carer. Fair enough, and clearly a step in the right direction, but — and I hate to break the news, guys — there’s a catch, and it’s halo shaped.
The Pension Funds Adjudicator recently ruled on three types of cases with regards to retirement annuities . The first relates to the value of paid-up policies, which currently involves six separate cases. One that made headlines was the Da Sousa case against Liberty Life’s Lifestyle retirement annuity fund where, after fees, the paid up value fell from R37 983 to R5 439.
Over 600 children were raped in two years by previously convicted rapists, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Tuesday. ”In 2002, 277 children were raped by persons previously convicted of rape, while in 2003 this figure has increased by 15% to 320, said DA member of Parliament Mike Waters.
Click on image for full-size view.