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/ 17 September 2007
Swazis have become acquainted with the term ”water rationing” as they struggle to cope with one of the longest dry periods in memory. ”Water levels are down nationwide,” said Jameson Mkhonta, public relations officer for the Swaziland Water Services Corporation, the parastatal water utility. ”The drought … [has affected the entire country], and not just in the south and east where it is usually dry.”
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/ 17 September 2007
Rio de Janeiro is a city of missing people. Since police records began in 1993, more than 10 000 people have vanished without trace here, while human rights activists say many more disappearances have gone unreported. Recent reports in the Brazilian press suggested that at least 7 000 of these cases were related to killings carried out by drug traffickers, death squads and corrupt police officers.
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/ 17 September 2007
Stiff challenges to President Robert Mugabe’s controversial economic policies are now coming from within his own party. In a move that is likely to rankle Mugabe, his own legislators on Wednesday summoned the Deputy Minister for Industry and International Trade, Phenias Chihota, to a ruling Zanu-PF party caucus meeting where he was told to ”revise his price controls” and stop ”disruption [to] business”.
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/ 17 September 2007
The Mail & Guardian‘s Ferial Haffajee speaks to Godfrey Oliphant, the head of parliament’s committee charged with electing a new SABC board. Oliphant has the inside track on the men and women who will guide the broadcaster.
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/ 17 September 2007
The only thing certain about the Competition Tribunal’s precedent-setting ruling against South Africa’s steel monolith, Arcelor Mittal SA, is that it’s going to have far-reaching consequences. But whether it is for Mittal or the tribunal itself, remains to be seen.
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/ 17 September 2007
What strange creatures we are, we yawners, a category that extends across species to include, I am told, mammals of many shapes, colours and stripes. How incomprehensible it is to us that we are sometimes taken, possessed even, by a fit of our physiologies, to extend our jaws and exhale with an intensity that animates only the orgasm and laughter.
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/ 17 September 2007
A tropical sun rises over Havana and in the neighbourhood of Vedado, a maze of worn, bleached apartment blocks, a unique healthcare system limbers up for another day. In Parque Aguirre, a small plaza shaded by palms, two dozen pensioners form a semi-circle and perform a series of stretches and gentle exercises, responding to the commands of a spry septuagenarian.
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/ 17 September 2007
The government is refusing to tackle increasing water shortages and instances of waterborne diseases in Bulawayo because of a struggle over control of the city’s water supply. Unless local officials hand over control of the water supply to a government agency, the central authorities have said they will not help the residents of the second-largest city.
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/ 17 September 2007
Before the protest march, leaflets were scattered around town claiming Libyan troops had entered Niger to annex the country’s oil and land while French business people were busy looting the country of its meagre wealth. And when hundreds of Nigeriens took to the streets of their capital recently, they did more than accuse neighbouring Libya of backing rebels and call for Areva, a French nuclear firm mining uranium in the north of the country, to leave.
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/ 17 September 2007
Professor Ruben Sher, the man who predicted 20 years ago that HIV/Aids would become a “biological holocaust” in South Africa, has died at the age of 78. Under apartheid, and at a time when the disease was seen as a problem of white homosexuals, he was the stubborn, forthright and vocal prophet warning of the looming tragedy.