Catalytic converters, hybrid cars, cleaner fuels, car-occupancy taxes … none of these will really change the fact that cars burning fossil fuels will eventually have to go. Gavin Foster looks at the looming problem of too many cars, too much pollution and not enough fuel.
It’s early on Saturday night, and volunteers are topping up their cellphone airtime before setting out to patrol Khayelitsha’s toughest areas.Together with a handful of police officers and reservists, the volunteers will weave their way on foot from around 7pm to 1am through the tightly packed shacklands of Nkanini, Kuyasa and Harare, Site B and Site C.
Vehicle tracking companies have recovered tens of thousands of vehicles since they started up just more than a decade ago. But not only do these companies find stolen cars, their staff also apprehend and arrest criminal suspects, locate chop shops and help the police break up syndicates.
The banking sector, probably more than any other industry, feels the greatest impact of crime. Banks are, after all, the custodians of the money that the criminals are after. Bank robberies take an unquantifiable toll on staff morale and productivity. The costs of maintaining integrity in the banking system in the face of card and online fraud costs the industry hundreds of millions of rands.
Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka told parliamentarians recently that, while fighting crime was a priority, she did not feel it should be an objective of government’s growth initiative, Asgisa. However crime is analysed, the truth is that business growth has been sharply constrained by crime levels.
<Media24’s wonder child <i>Weg</i>, the country’s first travel glossy in Afrikaans, is certainly putting pressure on the competition. But old hand <i>Getaway</i> remains the advertisers’ favourite – for now. Kalay Vani-Nair reports.
She struggles under her own weight, lumbering up the stairs, her thighs shaking with each step. Once she reaches the top, it will take several minutes for 50-year-old Mey Mint to catch her breath, the air hissing painfully in and out of her chest. Her rippling flesh is not the result of careless overeating, but rather of a tradition of force-feeding girls in a desert nation where obesity has long been the ideal of beauty.
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Protectionism and ageing populations pose the biggest long-term threats to a golden era of global economic growth that is on course to be the longest period of expansion since the late 1960s and early 1970s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said recently. In its half-yearly health check, the IMF said that there were unlikely to be knock-on effects from the housing-induced slowdown in the United States.
The killings at Virginia Tech university on Monday will stir fresh debate in the United States over gun control and what drives people to go on shooting rampages through schools and colleges. School shootings have prompted changes to school safety rules and sparked debate over the availability of guns.