Short-term insurer Santam on Wednesday reported a 181% increase in its interim headline earnings per share to 518 cents for the half-year ending June 2004, up from 184 cents in the same period in 2003. The group also declared an interim dividend per share of 95 cents, up 32% from 72 cents in the previous comparative period.
Although blessed with natural wonders, Malawi is struggling to woo visitors and fulfil the poor Southern African country’s ambition of turning tourism into a strong generator of foreign currency. Malawi, which dubs itself the ”Warm Heart of Africa”, boasts a slew of national parks, game reserves, mountains and Lake Malawi — Africa’s third-largest freshwater lake.
A R5-million aid package will be taken to Nyala, West Darfur in Sudan by the Gift of the Givers Foundation on Wednesday, to help ease the region’s humanitarian crisis. The organisation will charter an aircraft to fly the package to the El-Geneina camp near the Chad border, inside Sudan, where there was a huge concentration of internally displaced refugees.
The fire that claimed the lives of three Pollsmoor inmates is only part of a cycle of violence that prison staff fear has yet to reach its bloody climax. That climax, they say, may be the stabbing of one of their own colleagues. There have been three fires in the prison’s cavernous admissions centre over the past three days, the first on Sunday and the others — including the fatal one — on Monday afternoon.
”’Times they are a-changin”’: The once famously private 60s legend Bob Dylan, whose music moved a generation, is poised to tell all in a memoir to be published this autumn. Dylan, who at the age of 63 is planning to go on tour with Willie Nelson this summer, is set to focus on significant and influential periods of his life in the first of three books called simply Chronicles: Volume One, according to his publisher.
An official report on the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal on Tuesday blamed a failure of leadership at the Pentagon for negligence over prison conditions and confusion over interrogation rules which led to Animal House sadism in the Iraqi jail. The report did not pin direct responsibility on the United States defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, by name, nor did it find any top officials legally culpable.
The wreckage of a Russian airliner, which went missing on Tuesday night with 46 people on board, has been found near Russia’s southern city of Rostov-on-Don, emergency officials said on Wednesday, hours after another airliner, which crashed at the same time, was found south of Moscow with all 44 aboard dead.
"Feel like sending United States troops some goodies to help them in their fight against Everyone Else? Yes, I’m being ironic, but it’s still interesting to see the facilities set up to help the US troops online. (Whereas back in South Africa, 89% of the South African National Defence Force isn’t going to be around soon, and our government just shrugs)." Ian Fraser finds some interesting stuff online.
The next time you wake up to find fresh molehills dotted around your garden, you’ll probably see red, but think twice before you scream blue murder. That pesky mole may well be one of several endemic South African species, now critically endangered. But the Red Data Project seeks to change all that.
American conservationist Mike Fay is a man on a mission: to save Africa’s remaining wild places from further human depredation. To do this, he and co-pilot Peter Ragg will criss-cross the African continent to measure how heavily the human “footprint” has been imprinted in 93 major eco-regions. Maureen Brady meets these human eagles on World Environment Day.