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/ 13 November 2006
We may be at a green tipping point — but not everyone’s got the memo yet. The following products are so ungreen that they deserve the title "eco-nasties". Air "freshener" is a stupid idea, and this one, called "Baby after bath", smells like a box of perfumed nappy sacks. But let’s not worry about the perfume, even though, according to the label, it "may cause long-term adverse effects in the aquatic environment".
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/ 13 November 2006
Rumour has it that Tony Leon is leaving the DA to start a new party called the Neo-Malthusians. Its founding credo aims to make all South Africans rich because poor people take up too much space, eat too much food and drink too much water. The new party is inspired by the ideas of political economist Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 postulated that high fertility among the poor was responsible for stripping the Earth’s resources.
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/ 13 November 2006
The road to Dowa could be any road in rural Malawi. Subsistence farmers scratch out a living from desiccated, exhausted soil and pray for the rains to arrive soon. The blackened stubs of trees are mournful witnesses that this area was verdant indigenous woodland not so long ago. Now their function as recyclers of moisture is lost and the water that evaporates simply disappears. Rainfall has diminished and the rivers have shrunk to muddy trickles.
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/ 13 November 2006
Workers’ skeletons litter the mines of this land. Many of those killed underground were never retrieved; their families never had the opportunity to bury them decently, according to African rituals and tradition. In the worst disasters the recovered mineworkers are often unidentifiable and those families that insist on remains for ritual burials risk interring the wrong body.
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/ 13 November 2006
The poets are unhappy. First I read that Rian Malan saw only sad decay for our future. Then André Brink was being quoted around the globe spreading similar doom and gloom. Malan worried me no end. The last I heard, he was living in Fish Hoek or thereabouts with a person called the Princess, or something like this.
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/ 13 November 2006
Australia’s blistering summer has only just begun, but reservoir levels are dropping fast, crop forecasts have been slashed, and great swathes of the continent are entering what scientists this week called a "one-in-1 000-years drought”. With many regions now in their fifth year of drought, the government called an emergency water summit in Canberra.
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/ 13 November 2006
As the October rains finally rolled in over Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, last week, storm clouds of a different kind were gathering over the country’s universities. Learning ground to a halt and students were sent home as lecturers entered their second week of industrial action over stagnating salaries.
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/ 13 November 2006
England’s fielding horrors returned on Tuesday as their three-day practice match with New South Wales petered out to a tame draw at the Sydney Cricket Ground. NSW batted out their second innings from lunch to an agreed stumps on the final day, yet England blotted their Ashes preparations with a couple of fumbles.
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/ 13 November 2006
When the Maldives features in the media it is usually in the form of a paean to its silver sands, its magical island resorts in the crystal-clear waters of the Indian Ocean. Little is heard of the ways in which journalists who challenge the omnipotence of the government are harassed and suppressed.
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/ 13 November 2006
”I am going to charge you with the murder of that dead person.” With these words Superintendent Ngubane of the Booysens police station turned what had been just another dreary encounter with dysfunctional police into a full-on fight over the state of policing in Gauteng. I am a Quaker and on Friday evening, November 3, I was attending a meeting in Rosettenville, writes Justine White.