State hospitals are once again making the news with six babies dying at one hospital from bacteria infection – absolutely inexcusable in a country that is advanced enough to be holding a World Cup and one wonders when something will finally be done about the shocking state of our State hospitals. The Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital gets its electricity cut off because wires are stolen and then we hear that they cannot use their generators because they don’t have enough money to pay for diesel to run the generator!

One is appalled to hear such disgraceful stories, and it is no wonder that personal injury claims and medical negligence cases against the State are increasing. You can of course always read more about these types of matters at my website www.personalinjury.co.za .
 

The Road Accident Fund really seems to lurch from one low point, in terms of service delivery, to another, yet lower point. I don’t think people who do not deal with the Road Accident Fund on a daily basis, like attorneys and their staff, can appreciate the level of incompetence and ineptitude that we come across all of the time.

It seems to be absolutely impossible to get the Road Accident Fund to make payment of any settlement amount, even if it is in terms of a court order with a time limit on that court order, within any reasonable time frame and the dealings of attorneys with them are nothing short of a dismal – they seem, from our point of view, to have outsourced all of their work to their own attorneys. There is plenty of information about Road Accident Fund claims, and many of the successes of my firm, against all these difficulties, at our website at www.accidentclaim.co.za , but if you are with other attorneys, and they have not told you exactly how hard it is dealing with the Road Accident Fund, it is perhaps something that you should give some consideration to.
 

Early May marked the 10th anniversary of when the United States Military made the Global Positioning System, or as we know it, GPS, available to the public for use. I don’t think most of us realise that it has only been 10 years that the system has been available which has made it now remarkably easy for you to use your cell phone to locate precisely where you are, or get directions and has made companies like Garmin and TomTom into household names and major corporations. It is another example of when things happen, how quickly they open up new industries and developments.

I am glad to see that CD’s still have a place, and that is usually in your car to listen to Audio Books. They have been replaced on almost every other level by iPods and MP3 digital devices. I find Audio Books very stimulating to listen to in the car and it helps me increase how many books I am able to finish each month. I have always been a prolific reader, following in particular business, law and marketing as well as computers and technology.

If you are interested in more information about divorce matters, then our firm’s website at www.divorcelaw.co.za is always a good place to start. We have not been fantastic at updating it recently, but then again there are dramatic developments in divorce law every month, and so it really does have a lot of information you will find interesting, whether it is to do with divorce, maintenance and even quite a bit on rule 43 interim proceedings.

There are plenty of things that I would change, but one of them that drives me crazy is that in this day and age when people have turned against smoking on such a large scale, is why you have to have an ashtray built into your car? I cannot see why that cannot be an optional extra, for those who want it, because those who do not smoke will never allow someone else to smoke in their cars and so it is a waste of space for someone like me when I would not mind that being a little shelf for all the cards you have to pull out these days – garage cards, secure estate access cards, Exclusive Books card, etc, etc.

In short, the problems that have arisen in Greece and other European countries are quite simple – people have been paying too little tax and receiving too many benefits and they have done this by borrowing money. They have now borrowed too much, and basically what they need to do, at a time when there is a recession, is to increase their taxes and actually reduce government benefits and salaries. As you can imagine, that will not make any political party popular and the easiest way for a party to try and stay in power is to try and borrow the money and burden a future generation with the debts.

Against that background, and I am sure this will take a few years, it cannot be too long before a younger party comes up which basically appeals for say the 20 to 35 year old vote, which is substantial, by saying that their policy is to reduce benefits for the elderly, increase taxes on the wealthy (which do not generally include that many young people) and similar policies, on an immediate basis, to stop them being burdened with the problems later. As I say, I don’t think that is going to happen quite soon, but the reality of the matter is that it is actually what is in the interest of a younger generation and it is certainly not in their interest to be burdened with higher taxes later, because an older generation now has not properly paid their way.

It never ceases to amaze me how many aggressive drivers there are on the roads. The kind of driver who will try and overtake a car, just as two lanes narrow to one, and create some sort of racetrack scenario on our public roads. Sadly, this normally results in death or serious injury, but seemingly, and it is young people in particular, just do not seem to realise this. You could actually make a profile as to the cars that they drive, which are always in the R100 000,00 to R180 000,00 range and the sex and age, which is typically male from about 23 to 30 years and if I was involved in insurance, I certainly would not be insuring those types of drivers!

It is probably why, when they try to sell their cars that they always claim it was driven by their grandmother! There cannot be much left of an engine, given the way some of these people drive. The problem is that aggressive driving very seldom gets punished by law enforcement, which is focused on speeding traps in certain areas or who drove through a red robot, when often the dangerous scenario is happening outside of those traps.

I really gave up watching cricket a long time ago, when I realised that I did not have 5 days free time to watch a test. When I was a university student, it was a wonderful sport to watch and certainly when I was at school it was my favourite sport to play. I am one of those who will never forget the run-out involving Lance Klusener and Alan Donald, for which I blame Alan Donald, but I certainly think that at that time, we had a far superior cricket team to what we have now, and quite frankly, the law of averages will eventually kick in and South Africa will win a tournament but if my memory serves me correctly it is now 14 major tournaments and we have not won a single world championship out of the 14 we have contested.

There are only 5 or 6 countries who can actually win tournaments, so it is somewhat surprising that we still have not got one, let alone two. In any event, one can always hope for the when it rains, it pours principle and hope that when they eventually do win one, the second will follow shortly! Their early exit out of the 20/20 World Cup in the West Indies was certainly embarrassing for them.
 

Tiger Woods pulled out of the Players Championship on the final day apparently having a neck problem. He was in such pain that he apparently winced when he shook the hand of the player he was playing with. That might explain his somewhat poor performances recently, apart from the fact that he obviously is under extreme duress, and I think somewhat unfairly having to give interviews at every turn about how he is feeling on that day and various other things like that.

Tim Clark has finally broken through on the PGA Tour, winning the Players Championship. Although a regular player on the PGA Tour, this KwaZulu-Natal South Coast player, had never won having finished second 8 times on the world’s toughest tour. The Players Championship is basically known as the fifth major, or is the most important tournament of the year other than the four majors, so apart from winning approximately $1.7 million for coming first, he has certainly won a very prestigious title.

He strikes the ball a fairly short distance, relative to today’s top professionals, but his strength is his accuracy off the tee and he is particularly good with his irons as well. He also played in the Sun City Nedbank Challenge at the end of last year, featuring well and the winner of that tournament, Robert Allenby, finished second to him. The previous year’s winner of a Nedbank Challenge, Henrik Stenson, won the Players Championship the year after, so there seems to be quite a good correlation between the results in the Nedbank Challenge and the Players Championship.

The Boy Scouts in America were recently ordered to pay $18,5 in damages to people who had been molested when they were young and had joined the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts apparently kept their own secret files, as to when abuse is alleged, and in the Oregon case, there were over 1 000 files for the period 1964 to 1985 detailing alleged abuse by troop leaders and volunteers. It is terribly sad that something which obviously began with the very best of intentions, had turned into an organisation that unfortunately attracts some of the most unsavoury types of paedophiles and even sadder still, for those absolutely normal people who were involved, who are always going to now be viewed by parents as potential paedophiles. The Catholic Church has not been doing very much better, with the New York Times running one article after another, detailing how the current Pope was aware of sexual abuse in certain cases by some of the priests under his charge, and did not have them criminally prosecuted. The Vatican has come out with one denial after another, but most of those don’t sound particularly impressive to an attorney – and are along the lines of, yes, he did sign the letter, but that does not mean he read the contents properly. The bottom line is that you cannot be too paranoid about who you leave your children with.

It does not matter how careful you are, or how many cases you deal with involving products and devices that go wrong, it can still happen to you! My wife bought a shiny silver stand with some little lights on it that looks similar to those that you find on a Christmas tree and while she backed me up so that I could take a photograph of my children, two of those tiny globes instantly burnt two holes through my Nike jacket. I really could not have pressed against them for more than a second or so, and yet in that time they not only burnt approximately 4 cm square holes in the material, but actually slightly burnt my back. When you start looking around your house at the children’s toys that have been manufactured in China and sprayed with who knows what paint and chemicals and the various devices, you have to know that danger lurks at every corner!

I really like this growing trend, ahead of the World Cup, for people to put South African flags on their cars. You can get the suction cap ones for free at most garages and the street vendors are selling the ones that clip onto your window, which work better, and are bigger, for about R30. I put two each on the cars for my firm and I am also putting one on my car. Hopefully, whatever number of tourists come to South Africa, will get to see a very proud nation.

The golf handicap system has once again changed. People now have one handicap only, and not a lower one for competitions. Essentially your handicap is the average number of shots in your best 10 games out of your last 20 games that you have shot over the course rating.

The changes mean, in my opinion, that people probably also ultimately drop a shot in their handicaps, because there will be a few more holes they can double bogey and as a result will probably take an extra shot in some places.

Interestingly enough, when men talk about what handicap they used to be, many of them are referring to the old system, which gave you a far lower figure and they talk about their golf as if it was at the peak at that time when in reality, that system essentially gave you as much as a 30% lower handicap than you get now, as it used to be the average of your best six scores, less 25%. To take the best 10 scores, and average those out, is in fact the far more realistic reflection of one’s actual game and so the 9 handicap of 3 or 4 years ago, on today’s system was probably really a 13 at that time.
 

I am sure a lot of people are disappointed that the optimistic figures about the number of overseas visitors that will be travelling to South Africa are not real. I think on the other hand this has always been a chance for South Africa to rebrand itself and we forget what a powerful medium television is.

What I would like us to take out of this World Cup is the chance to promote ourselves to the rest of the world so that we do become a major tourist destination. If the rest of the world gets to see our fancy stadiums, as well as some of the scenes and highlights of South Africa, it will be a job well done and it will not necessarily be any problem whether 200 000 people are coming to South Africa or 450 000 as was initially predicted. The bottom line is what happens in the future and if the rest of world sees that we can host the biggest tournament in the world, which we can, it will change the perception they have of wildest Africa with animals walking in our streets!
 

Bandwidth in South Africa is increasing, and by the end of next year, we apparently are going to have lots of international bandwidth. The biggest problem at the moment is that Telkom controls the last kilometre or two from the exchange to your home or to your business, and until that is unlocked, Telkom can demand a high price for access to those wires.

At the moment networks are being built by Neotel, MTN and Vodacom following roughly the routes of the N3, N2 as well as the N12 and N1. Apparently, if you travel by car to Durban at the moment you can see the trenches that are currently being dug to lace South Africa with the fibre-optic cable. Good times are ahead for people who like the Internet and like it fast, but it is still going to take time.
 

The Sandton CBD continues to grow, and from a distance you can always see quite a few cranes. Of course, it does equal one block in downtown Manhattan, but this is a much smaller country! I imagine that in years to come we are going to see a lot more blocks of flats in Sandton and that suburbs like Atholl, which at the moment comprise largely of homes, will essentially be rebuilt as flats and townhouses. Their value lies in their central location, as with Hyde Park and Sandhurst, to the ever-growing Sandton CBD.

The British government has come out with some new requirements for UK visas, and it actually makes it easier for some South Africans to now gain access to the UK. The recent clamp down really reduced how many people could go and work in the UK, but in terms of the new requirements, you will need to earn at least 75 points, and for example, if you hold a Bachelors Degree that will automatically get you 30 points.

In other words, people who hold a BA will now be able to enter the UK much more easily. They will also look at what you are earning with the minimum level of earnings from which you can claim points set at £25 000,00. This is not actually based on the exchange rate, but on a multiplier. Let’s hope that this does not lead to us losing a few more talented South Africans.
 

I am surprised that everyone has been surprised about the fiasco with the tickets. I don’t think the tickets have been handled well, from day one, when you had to get them on the ridiculously difficult Fifa.com website and just from my own understanding of my own employees, I quickly realised that the vast majority of people do not have credit cards and are not able to pay for tickets that way.

It is a pity that the system could not run better when they must have had almost a year since the ticket sales initially opened, before they began the ticket sales to the public, but it is at least very heartening to see the incredible local support for the 2010 World Cup.