Israel’s Finance Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, resigned from the government on Sunday, claiming its plan to withdraw from settlements in the occupied territories would allow the creation of a base for ”Islamic terrorism”. Netanyahu submitted his letter of resignation as the Cabinet met to rubber stamp the first phase of the evacuation of settlements in Gaza.
The United States space agency Nasa will hope to lay the ghosts of the Columbia disaster to rest on Monday morning as it guides the shuttle Discovery back to earth at the end of the US’s first manned space mission for two-and-a-half years.
She has pipe-stem limbs and displays every rib on her narrow chest, but two-year-old Hasana is not sick enough to be treated in a hospital. Under a white plastic tent, an aid agency doctor has a few minutes to make decisions about the lives of scores of babies. Outside his tent, a sea of desperate mothers queue in the boiling sun, hoping for food for their children.
The public protector’s report on Oilgate is a dismal, depressing, disingenuous display of intellectual dishonesty. First and foremost, the public protector has taken an absurdly literal and narrow view of the distinction between public and private. As the report is at pains to point out, the public protector’s statutory duty is to investigate maladministration in public office.
HCI, the JSE Securities Exchange-listed group, headed by former trade unionists Marcel Golding and John Copelyn, may be remembered as South Africa’s first black economic empowerment predator. It recently bid for control of Johnnic, its chief rival for control of Tsogo Investment Holdings, which in turn controls the casino and hotel assets of Tsogo Sun. HCI stands accused of sharp practice as it wages its casino war.
When, in 1981, Margaret Thatcher met Fahd bin Abdul Aziz bin Saud for the first time, she came away distinctly unimpressed. ”You say this man runs the country,” she sniffed, ”he didn’t have a word to say for himself.” She was wrong. Fahd, who has died aged 84, was only crown prince of Saudi Arabia at the time, and what the British prime minister did not realise was how punctilious the house of Saud was in its notions of hierarchy.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala relishes a good fight. Which is just as well. Since Nigeria’s president persuaded her to sort out the country’s infamously chaotic finances and rein in its notorious corruption, she’s been hailed by world leaders and reviled by her fellow countrymen.”When I became finance minister they called me Okonjo-Wahala — or Trouble Woman,” chuckles the 51-year-old.
Hassan Feiraz, a 16-year-old boy, has started a desperate new life since being forced into the sex trade in Baghdad, joining a growing number of adolescents soliciting in Iraq under the threat of street gangs or the force of poverty. ”My life is a disaster today. I could be killed by my family to restore their honour,” he says.
The recent bomb blasts in the popular tourist city of London has forced countries around the world to examine their own ability to prevent similar attacks. Institute for Security Studies analyst Anneli Botha says a distinction has to be made between domestic and international terrorism.
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