Friday March 11, 2011

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Brad Dubbelman

Making headlines:

Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said South Africa needs to double the rate of its economic growth in order to create jobs. "What South Africa requires is to move out of this cycle of 3% or 4% or 4,5% growth," Gordhan said in a speech at the University of Johannesburg. "We need to do something that will get us to 7% and sustain it for 20 years." The Treasury last month cut its economic growth forecast for 2011 to 3,4% from 3,5% projected last October. The economy grew 2,8% last year, emerging from its first recession in nearly two decades.

Madagascar's Prime Minister and his government resigned on Thursday, in line with a road map proposed by international mediators to end a two-year political crisis on the Indian Ocean island. Eight out of 11 political groups in Madagascar initialled the plan backed by the Southern African Development Community on Wednesday. It calls for a new Prime Minister to be appointed, based on proposals from the political parties. "The Prime Minister and the government he ran have presented their resignations to me," President Andry Rajoelina told reporters. "I have accepted the resignation of the government."

Climate change is probably the world’s biggest distraction and not its biggest and most immediate challenge, which belongs to clean water, says Professor Grant Cawthorn, Wits University’s School of Geosciences Platinum Industry Igneous Petrology professor. Cawthorn, contends that the lack of fresh water will have a much greater global impact than a “one or two degree” temperature rise. In a public climate-change lecture delivered to a packed Origins Centre audience in Johannesburg, Cawthorn singled out clean water as the “world’s most imminent challenge”, pollution as the “world’s biggest single over-riding problem” and slammed climate change as “the world’s biggest distraction”.

Also making headlines:
France recognised the Libyan National Council, a rebel body fighting to oust Muammar Gaddafi, as the legitimate representative of Libya's people, the first country to make the move.
Zimbabwe's cabinet has not yet decided minimum local ownership thresholds under a plan by which foreign companies would surrender a 51% stake of their firms to the government, the Prime Minister said.
Envoys of the Côte d’Ivoire’s Laurent Gbagbo rejected an African Union proposed plan to end a violent power struggle and warned that the West African country now risked a return to civil war.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.