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/ 4 December 2007
The Paris boat show, extended this year to 15km of alleys with 1Â 200 stands, opened this weekend stressing measures by the boatbuilding industry to protect the environment. Yachting is a huge leisure activity in France, which is home to leading boatbuilder Beneteau.
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/ 4 December 2007
First there was economy class, business class and, on some airlines, first class. The discerning traveller can even book an exclusive suite, but the newest addition to the world of air travel is "green class". Unlike other classes, green class offers no exclusive perks such as vegan meals. Instead you could end up next to a snoring Texan who drives a gas-guzzling SUV and who paid a lot less for his seat than you did.
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/ 4 December 2007
The human rights of the world’s poorest people will be violated unless developed countries accept the need for drastic and immediate steps to prevent global warming from triggering dangerous climate change, the United Nations warned recently. Calling for urgent action on a post-Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, the UN said the risks of "ecological catastrophe" were increasing.
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/ 4 December 2007
When it comes to truly deplorable writing, not even death, it seems, lets you off the hook. This year’s Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award has gone to the late Norman Mailer for a description of oral sex in his final novel, The Castle in the Forest, in which a male member is likened to a ”coil of excrement”.
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/ 4 December 2007
Russia goes to the polls on Sunday under a shadow. Many foreign observers will be scattered across the country, but the West’s preferred agency for election observing, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OCSE), claims it was blocked from sending monitors to Moscow.
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/ 4 December 2007
The Breede River Valley in the Western Cape is known as a fertile farming area that hosts internationally renowned vineyards, picturesque fruit orchards and tourist farm stalls, but a visit to Ashton’s Zolani township quickly scrapes away the lush veneer to reveal the reality of unemployment, poverty and hunger for many of its inhabitants.
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/ 4 December 2007
I was shocked – shocked! — to read that comrade Jan Serfontein, recently appointed North West minister for agriculture, conservation and environment, has been accused of being a farmer who closes off water for poor blacks. I have known comrade Jan since I was young, having attended his farm school outside Potchefstroom for part of my primary schooling, writes Andile Mngxitama.
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/ 4 December 2007
Hacking his way through the lush forest with a machete, his rubber boots sinking into the moist earth, Lambert Kwame surveys the plot of land that his family has worked for more than 30 years, harvesting cocoa. ”We know that the national price for cocoa is very high,” Kwame says as he stands under a fecund canopy about an hour north of Côte d’Ivoire’s commercial capital, Abidjan.
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/ 3 December 2007
Hello kitty kitty kitty … Are you an orphan? Are you Sudanese? Chadian? Are you a sub-Saharan African suffering from mild mental retardation? Are you an African woman suffering from the African male? Would you like an Oxfam biscuit? Organic antiretrovirals? Have you been raped? You might not know it, but you are an orphan, a refugee.