Refugee camps can be dangerous, expensive and degrading. Is this how South Africans want to treat their fleeing Zimbabwean neighbours? The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> ("SA’s Zim exodus plan", August 10) reported that the government may update a 2002 plan to help structure its response to Zimbabweans entering South Africa, writes Tara Polzer.
It was a potent symbol of a new world order on August 21 when China raised interest rates for the fourth time this year in a desperate attempt to cool an overheated local economy. The move comes at a time when central bankers in the West are wondering whether they should be cutting the cost of borrowing to stave off a potential economic downturn caused by the credit crisis.
A mass free distribution of mosquito nets in Kenya that has nearly halved child deaths from malaria in high-risk areas has led the World Health Organisation to recommend for the first time that nets should be given away, rather than sold, in the developing world. In a project that is being hailed as a model for other African countries, Kenya’s ministry of health has distributed 13,5-million insecticide-treated nets across the country since 2003.
Surinder Arora arrived in London at the age of 13, unable to speak a word of English. He was met at Heathrow Airport by a couple he thought were his aunt and uncle. After a few days, they sat him down and told him the truth. He was their son, and they had handed him to a childless couple in India, his real aunt and uncle, when he was born.
With returns from virtually all polling stations announced by the National Electoral Commission (NEC), it is clear now that a run-off poll will take place between the two leading presidential contenders in Sierra Leone. In two weeks the opposition All People’s Congress (APC) candidate, Ernest Bai Koroma, will face the current Vice-President, Solomon Ekuma Berewa in a one-on-one contest that will bring the electoral process to its logical conclusion.
Presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga wants evidence of dereliction of duty by the health minister. But the Aids-drug lobby offers only Wikipedia constitutionalism, asserting that Thabo Mbeki has fired the true architect of the country’s widely admired HIV/Aids policies, former deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, writes Ronald Suresh Roberts.
Here comes the No 1 gruesome invention of the century: the bra you wear 1cm under your skin, called Cup&Up. Dr Eyal Gur, head of microsurgery at the Sourasky medical centre in Tel Aviv, has thought up this ghastly procedure, and claims that droves of women are clamouring to have it done for a few thousand dollars.
I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. ”This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”
The findings contained in the 260-page report by Kader Asmal’s ad hoc committee on the review of Chapter 9 and related institutions makes far-reaching recommendations that might require the amendment of the Constitution, the retrenchment of up to 40 commissioners and will test the political will of the executive.
One of the most inequitable and amoral acts in modern times is happening in front of our eyes and there is hardly a murmur of protest. The multibillion-dollar bail-out of global finance after one of the most reckless periods of lending and deal-making since the late 1920s is extraordinarily one-sided.