Staff Reporter

In Mozambique’s pretty port city of Maputo, South Africa is omnipresent. Dominoes Pizza, Steers, Shoprite, even Clear Channel advertising hoardings hold up the signs advertising, well … more South African businesses, the Yellow Pages included.

Representatives of civil society organisations from all over the African continent are lobbying for greater participation in decision-making processes in the African Union.

A South African black economic empowerment consortium — Dinatla — is to make an offer to South African industrial services group Bidvest shareholders for 15% of the group. The deal is worth approximately R2-billion.

Disclosing the action taken by companies to manage the risk presented by HIV/Aids is more important than disclosing the results of HIV/Aids prevalence tests, according to Stephen Kramer, Actuarial Researcher for listed financial services group New Africa Capital Metropolitan Aids Unit.

The widening gulf between the global haves and have-nots was starkly revealed last night when the United Nations announced that while the United States was booming in the 1990s more than 50 countries suffered falling living standards.

Six British soldiers, described by their war criminal Prime Minister, Tony "Blah-Blah" Blair back home in Westminster as being involved in doing an "extraordinary and heroic job", were killed, as it turned out, by an infuriated mob in southern Iraq last week.

The theme this week is capitalism – and no – it’s not a boring rant about the evils of whatever – it’s just taking a look at the kinds of things that people are selling, that are available online.

This week it’s mostly assorted useful sites – although the usefulness factor for some of them does possible depend on how much of an anarchist you are. But to kickstart the concept, let’s look at that computer of yours. (And this is one of the few ‘real’ useful sites that you actually should take time to work through.)

I hate to use a quote from a self righteous pretentious prat like Bono but there’s that classic moment from U2’s Zoo Tour of a few years back where he stands up and in the persona of an evangelical huckster and yells "I have a vision! I have a vision! Television!"

You may not know this, but the internet has advanced a lot from the days when I first stumbled onto it. Back then, the novelty factor was big websites –and websites with a coffee cam (or any kind of cam) were big crowd pullers.

It’s rather interesting that for a supposedly non-racial society, every time anyone complains about anything, this government raises the issue of race. No matter what the problem is, this ‘non-racial’ government makes a point of bringing in racial identity either as an excuse for why the problem exists, or uses the race of the complainer as a way of attacking the critic.

US President George Bush paid homage on Tuesday to African slaves who passed through the port here, calling slavery "one of the greatest crimes of history" that nonetheless stirred America’s commitment to freedom.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=16820">Bush jets into Pretoria tonight</a>
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=16806">Mbeki and Bush to talk money </a>

Nedcor Securities’ research team has joined forces with two other top international broking houses to create an international research alliance.

Some criticism of the Broad-Based Economic Empowerment Bill would be accommodated, but the law’s "basic architecture" would remain intact, a senior government official said last week.

A debate around the compulsory HIV testing of miners is set to shake up the mining industry in the coming months. Concerns are that miners whose HIV status is known could be the target of discrimination.

Pink Software, one of South Africa’s oldest computer software companies, has decided to give away its accounting package, TurboCASH.7, free of charge, managing director Philip Copeman announced on Monday.

Corporate reporting is undergoing a revolution as more and more multinational and local companies report on their management of social, environmental and economic impacts — the "triple bottom line".

If the Anglo-American war against Iraq was not a racial war, then what was it? Check out the way the media (including our own version of that shameful crew) choose to describe it.

Ghanaian health authorities have ordered anti-retroviral drugs from undisclosed sources to cater for the treatment of 2000 HIV/Aids patients for the next two years.

Two Technikon South Africa (TSA) officials are facing a disciplinary inquiry after a forensic report alleged that they fraudulently authorised staff retrenchments and irregularly made payments to creditors.

South Africans opposed to United States President George Bush’s visit to South Africa next Wednesday have been drawn by 300 social movements affiliated to the Anti-War Coalition into demanding that the African National Congress cancel the visit.

Sadness, grief, relief and joy. These were some of the emotions which swept through a crowd of about 400 hundred people who marched down High Street waving wild olive branches as part of a mass "ceremony of reconciliation" at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown yesterday.

The trouble with obituaries is that their subjects never get to read them — well almost never.

As African leaders prepare to receive United States President George W Bush, they could do no worse than to ignore the old Nigerian proverb: the person that always eats bread does not appreciate the severity of a famine.