In its 60th year as an independent nation, India has just elected its first woman president. Yet the ascent of the demure Pratibha Patil may not necessarily be a victory for Indian women. Today, in India, "women’s empowerment" is a government slogan; it is a feature of every party manifesto. There is a ministry for women and child development.
Last week we commemorated the brave women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956 to protest against the discriminatory policies of apartheid. But, after the marchers have gone home and the banners are packed away, how free and equal are South Africa’s women really?
While many land claims in rural areas have been settled, land restored to communities has often failed to bring hoped-for jobs and income. But one Mpumalanga community has found a way to break the deadlock and use its land to start tourism ventures. The beauty of eastern Mpumalanga and the evident prosperity of tourism ventures disguises the endemic poverty in the area.
Eskom will decide by year-end whether it will proceed with a new 100MW facility powered entirely by the sun. Concentrated solar power is a relatively new technology worldwide, but it has the backing of the World Bank because it is the only zero-greenhouse-gas-emission technology that has the potential to rival coal-fired power as a low-cost solution to the energy crisis.
A mid all the hoopla surrounding the 60th anniversary of Indian independence, almost nothing has been heard from Pakistan, which also turned 60 recently. Nothing, that is, if you discount the low rumble of suicide bombings, the noise of automatic weapons storming the Red Mosque and the creak of slowly collapsing dictatorships.
In one of the largest deals of the web 2.0 era, the Walt Disney Company recently agreed to pay as much as -million to buy Club Penguin, a ”virtual world” for children between the ages of six and 14. When kids join Club Penguin, they adopt an animated penguin as their online alter ego, or avatar.
First the gay and lesbian community got its own red carpet movie bash. Then every embassy in Pretoria wanted theirs. Then serious nonÂÂfiction film buffs got the Encounters film festival and hard-line political activists followed suit with the Tri-Continental festival and its focus on the countries of the South.
When Katrin Himmler was 15, a classmate at her Berlin school asked her during a history lesson if she was related to Heinrich Himmler, the feared head of Hitler’s SS and a key architect of the Holocaust. When she told them that he was, in fact, her great-uncle, the whole class fell silent and the teacher carried on as if nothing had been said.
The Vatican may have territorial limits, its own post office and even a football tournament, but it has hitherto lacked what all real states offer: an airline. That will be put right this month as the Vatican launches its first charter flights for pilgrims from Rome to Lourdes, with some of the world’s top religious destinations to follow, including the shrine of Fatima in Portugal and the shrine of the Madonna of Guadalupe in Mexico.
For Americans sitting in cinemas watching the summer’s fun movies, such as The Simpsons and Hairspray, the trailer for Lions for Lambs is jarring and unexpected. It opens with a moody shot of the Washington Memorial, and shifts to a series of quick-fire scenes about President George W Bush’s ”war on terror”.