South African cellphone users can finally start getting used to paying for the actual airtime they use now that the leading players are offering per-second billing on some (Vodacom, MTN and Cell-C) or all (Virgin) of their packages. But this is only for cellphone calls to other cellphones or landlines.
Sibongile Mazibuko is used to stress. She had better be, because she is in charge of making sure Johannesburg is ready and able to host the World Cup in four years’ time. But if she is taking strain, her voice certainly doesn’t show it when she makes time for a hurried interview with the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>.
A family live in a corrugated iron shack with no sanitation, among thousands of other brightly painted corrugated iron shacks in Khayelitsha on the outskirts of Cape Town. Ten people, five of them children, share three dark rooms and nobody earns any money. They are among the poorest people on the planet.
When Uzonna Tochi picked up the phone last week, he heard the most chilling words of his life. ”Please do something fast to save my life; they might execute me anytime now,” Uzonna’s older brother, Iwuchukwu Amara Tochi, pleaded from Singapore. Iwuchukwu Amara Tochi is sitting on death row in Singapore with Okele Nelson Malachy condemned in March after being found guilty of transporting heroin into Singapore.
Telling your 71-year-old grandmother you plan to construct a gigantic replica of a uterus on her doorstep must be one of the least pleasant tasks for any grandson. That, however, is the bind of Igor de Vetyemy, a young Brazilian architect behind a controversial project to build a museum inspired entirely by sex on one of the world’s most famous beaches.
A form of primordial slime could hold the answer to preserving the fertility of women who have cancer — and even help preserve critically endangered mammals such as the Siberian tiger and Mexican wolf. The ”slime”, called alginate, is extracted from algae, and is being used by a team of fertility scientists from Northwestern University in Illinois in the United States.
It is not that Terezinha da Silva does not like what she is doing. She would just prefer that it be given another name. ”I don’t like the phrase ‘fighting poverty’ or ‘alleviating’ it. I prefer ‘programme for development’, like they call it in countries like Botswana. Poverty is too wide a topic and it can mean different things to different people.”
The split within the international community over the Lebanon war was clearly exposed recently when the United States and Britain combined at a Rome summit to block a move by European and Arab countries to demand an immediate ceasefire.
For a country with an unelected hereditary leader, there is a blunt irony in calling itself the Democratic Republic of Congo. This vast swath of Central Africa is many things — a failed state, a humanitarian crisis, a natural resource bounty — but a representative democracy it is not. That may be about to change with Sunday’s vote — the first multi-party elections in 40 years.
It is a sin to cause misery to others, you would agree, yes? And yet I bet that at this very moment you are sitting in an office where people can clearly see your — jeez, I dread to think — snub nose? Crow’s-feet? Spludged thighs? Small tits? I’m sorry, I can’t go on, I’m feeling quite sick.