Using renewable energy can be expensive, but households can start managing their energy requirements by considering both the demand and supply side of the equation. They can diversify through using renewable sources and the most energy-efficient options. The house becomes the power plant and the shortfall is sourced from the grid.
"A wise and courageous decision," the then- vice-president FW de Klerk called it when we met in Amsterdam in 1995. These few encouraging words dispelled all our doubts about moving to South Africa. In April 1996, with my wife Patricia and son Ludo, we left Holland behind.
In a classic American western, there are good guys and bad guys. The good ones are the settlers, who are making the prairie bloom; the bad ones are the Indians, who are blood-thirsty savages. The hero is the cowboy — with a big revolver or two, ready to defend himself at all times.
It is a party trick well known to curious teenagers across the United States. Zoom down on Washington via Google Earth and you get an extraordinary eagle-eyed view of the world’s greatest powerhouse. There’s the White House and its West Wing. Sweeping south-east across the Potomac you soar above the Pentagon. But there is one thing you can’t do.
At five feet tall, Asma Jahangir is not an imposing figure, but for almost four decades she has towered over Pakistan’s human rights war. She has championed battered wives, rescued teenÂagers from death row, defended people accused of blasphemy and sought justice for the victims of honour killings. These battles have won her admirers and enemies in great number.
When Pam Mokoena heard the sound of gunfire, she didn’t bat an eyelid. Hours later she was cradling the body of the second brother to have been gunned down in South Africa’s murder capital. Pointing to her sibling’s dried blood on the streets of Cape Town’s Nyanga township, Mokoena shakes her head and mumbles: ”Only God knows what is happening here.”
It must rank among the greatest compliments the late Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, ever received. A court in Chicago recently heard Frank Calabrese Sr commend the description in the novel of a mafia initiation ceremony as ”very close” to the truth. Coming from Calabrese, that was high praise indeed. He is alleged to be a head of one of Chicago’s most notorious crime syndicates, the Outfit.
Take five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who are working in an ill-equipped hospital. Accuse them wrongly of infecting 426 children with HIV-contaminated blood. Then lock them up for eight years, torture confessions out of them and sentence them to death, and you end up with a full partnership deal with the European Union.
United Kingdom high street bank Barclays surprised the City of London last week by announcing an audacious tie-up with the Chinese government to boost its bid for ABN Amro. Barclays tabled a â,¬67,5billion improved cash-and-shares offer for the Dutch bank after it won a pledge from the state-run China Development Bank (CDB) to inject â,¬10,4billion into the merger, should it go ahead.
Environmentalists are up in arms about who should be responsible for ensuring the mining industry cleans up its act as Eskom fast-tracks its coal-fired power plans. Eskom has announced its intention to double electricity output in the next 20 years and the department of minerals and energy is the main player and referee in issuing and policing coal-mining permits.