The JSE Securities Exchange South Africa was flat in noon trade on Wednesday, having surrendered early gains due to profit taking and weakness in European markets. Volumes were good, despite a lack of fresh news to draw players into the market.
The Eastern Cape education department has overspent its budget by more than R600-million, the province’s education minister Mkhangeli Matomela told MPs on Tuesday. Briefing Parliament’s education select committee, he warned the overspending would lead, among other things, to cutting the number of schools the region had planned to build this year.
A former Maoist radical has launched Beijing’s first bunny bar, but China’s playboy revolution is already foundering. In the 70s CK Yu, the son of a Taiwanese general, was running a bookshop in California selling the works of Mao Zedong. Yu’s bar, Buck and Bunny, opened last Friday in Sanlitun, the capital’s diplomatic district.
With due pomp and ceremony the Royal Navy handed over the submarine HMS Upholder to the Canadians at the weekend. The vessel was renamed HMCS Chicoutimi — after the city on the edge of Quebec’s vast northern wilds — and the maple leaf flag was hoisted. Then after its final preparations, it began to chug towards Nova Scotia.
The hour-long drive up route 93 from Boston to Derry in New Hampshire (population 34 021) is punctuated by banners calling on people to ”support the troops” and others saying ”bring the troops home”. It is also framed by a New England fall.
Debt servicing at any level is incompatible with attaining the United Nations Millennium Development Goals in many African countries, according to <i>Debt Sustainability: Oasis or Mirage?</i>, released today by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad). The report concludes that any lasting solution to the debt overhang hinges as much on political will as on financial rectitude.
A cold front will hit the Western Cape province from Wednesday evening and should continue moving over South Africa, while at the same time bringing rain, until Tuesday next week, said South African Weather Service (Saws) forecaster Evert Scholtz. There should be heavy showers over parts of the Western and Eastern Cape up until Friday.
One of the 68 men held in a Zimbabwean jail over an alleged plot to overthrow the government in Equatorial Guinea died on Tuesday, the state news agency reported. Ngave Jarukemo Muharukua (35) died in a Harare hospital where he had been admitted last week, the Ziana news agency said. The cause of death was not revealed.
Three news photographers were arrested in Zimbabwe while trying to cover a protest outside Parliament by about 30 women who were also detained by police, their lawyer said on Wednesday. The photographers, who include Reuters photojournalist Howard Burditt, were picked up by police on Tuesday afternoon while covering the arrest of around 30 women demonstrators.
South Africa’s Minister of Labour, Membathisi Mdladlana, said on Tuesday that skills-and-development programmes were critically important in meeting the Government’s aim of halving poverty and unemployment by 2014. Speaking on the last day of the Imbizo Programme in Limpopo, Mdladlana commended community-development initiatives in providing skills and creating jobs for local communities.