Responding to the need to protect clients’ fixed-deposit investment returns against potential volatility, Investec Private Bank’s Treasury team has created HedgePlus, a six-month, prime-linked fixed deposit, designed to hedge against fluctuations in returns using three leading economic factors.
The United States government warned its citizens to keep a low profile on Monday after a car bomb hit a private US security firm in the Afghan capital, killing at least seven people, including two Americans. The Taliban claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack on the office of Dyncorp, which provides bodyguards for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and works for the American government in Iraq.
A young boy looking for his mother walked from one subway station to another on the train tracks, narrowly dodging an oncoming train, a subway official said on Monday. The boy’s mother had mistakenly left him on a subway train and he walked the tracks looking for her after getting off at the next station.
A woman believed to be the wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il died of a heart attack earlier this month after a long battle with breast cancer, South Korean news reports said on Monday. Secret funeral services have been held in Pyongyang for Kim’s second wife, Ko Yong-Hui (51) who died on August 13 after returning home from Paris where she received cancer treatment.
Three people, including two children, burnt to death when their home was set alight by a mob in Esikhawini, north of Durban, over the weekend, KwaZulu-Natal police said. The mob poured petrol on two rondavels and a six-roomed house and set them on fire. The group then started shooting occupants of the houses through the windows.
A new trust fund in memory of outstanding Kenyan scientist Thomas Risley Odhiambo is being set up by the African Academy of Sciences to bankroll young scientists across the continent who are tackling local problems. Odhiambo believed that scientists could be instrumental in changing the fate of his continent.
Half of the country’s population does not participate in the economy because they cannot afford the hefty bank charges to run a savings account — built-in insurance against ”high-risk” clients. In the first of a series examining the apparent cartels that increasingly dominate our lives, we look at banking — an essential service from which millions are excluded.
About 200 000 traditional healers are regularly consulted by at least 70% of South Africans. To date, there has been no single statutory body to control these practitioners. But efforts are under way to integrate traditional medicine into the health-care system through legislation, albeit gradually.
Shocking new research exposes some of the South Africa’s drug rehabilitation centres as poorly run institutions where physical and psychological ill treatment of patients is rife. ”The government needs to take responsibility. They need to pay attention to the programmes that are offered at the centres and not just concentrate on clean kitchens and toilets as some of the main criteria,” says a researcher.
There are 35 000 genes in the humble coffee bean. So say scientists in Brazil, after studying 200 000 strands of DNA and drinking an unspecified amount of the brew itself. This genetic research will lead to better-tasting coffee — significant news for Africa’s embattled coffee producers.