For a British Foreign Office mandarin, it was unusually colourful language. Edward Clay, the British High Commissioner in Kenya, told his audience that ministers ”could hardly expect us not to care when their gluttony causes them to vomit all over our shoes”. The remarks have sparked a diplomatic tiff.
China is offering to pay couples a premium for producing baby girls to counter an alarming gender imbalance created by the country’s one-child population control policy. Last year, 117 boys were born for every 100 girls in China, meaning the country faces a socially destabilising shortage of more than 30-million women by 2020.
The United Kingdom on Thursday signalled a major rift with the United States over its Aids policies, publicly rejecting the Bush doctrine that sexual abstinence is the best way to stop the spread of the pandemic. The UK does not support the US over its reluctance to endorse the use of cheaper, generic drugs to fight the disease.
Well-known artists including Hugh Masekela, Tshepo Tshola, Jabu Khanyile and Busi Mhlongo are furious because a prominent music promoter has not paid them for a concert in Port Elizabeth six months ago. Now their agent, Chissa Artists, has initiated legal action against the promoter to recover the outstanding R200 000.
A high court tug-of-war over prime property in Port Elizabeth is turning the vision of a giant statue of Nelson Mandela into little more than a pipe dream. Transport parastatal Transnet, which owns the land, has distanced itself in court papers from the proposed statue, saying it has "no intention of participating in the proposed development".
Janjaweed is not a name. It is a curse. To the militia’s victims the Arabic word has come to mean devil on horseback, but the chief "devil" accused of bringing devastation to Sudan sits not on horseback but in a plush armchair in his family residence in Khartoum. He is allegedly the most senior field commander of the Janjaweed.
The South African rand was hovering just below the psychological R6,00 per dollar level in late afternoon trade on Friday, after breaching this level a couple of hours earlier on the back of offshore dollar sales. The rand earlier touched R5,95 the first time since June1999.
For too long science has overlooked the hillbilly. Perhaps fearing being tied to a tree and molested, anthropologists and sociologists have eschewed the deep woods, failing to draw back the mosquito net of secrecy that still obscures this remarkable tribe. Scratch the surface of the hillbilly, and we find little rolls of dirt and traces of antifreeze under our fingernails. Wash the surface and then scratch, and we find the story of humanity itself.
The economy is the strongest it has been in a decade — but the best is yet to come. Economists believe economic growth could sail above 3% this year, well ahead of the 2,8% originally projected, buoyed by surging consumer confidence and higher manufacturing output. The impressive growth owes itself to the low inflation and surging consumer confidence.
Vehicle sales are a major economic index — but they also serve as a useful demographic indicator. This week vehicle finance bank Wesbank released figures showing that over the past 10 years the value of vehicle loans to black clients increased tenfold, from R736-million in 1994 to R7,6-billion in 2004. This increase occurred against the backdrop of a 490% increase in the bank’s total book.