Healthcare workers Initiative: Weak healthcare systems and a shortage of healthcare workers are undermining efforts to deliver anti-retroviral drugs to Africa, Kevin de Cock, director of the HIV/Aids Department at the World Health Organisation (WHO), said last week.
Fica is a four-letter word for anyone who has had financial dealings in the past three years. Consumers have had to provide certified copies of a set of documents for each account with every financial institution, the information required varying between institutions.
I woke at dawn and leapt out of bed in my usual energetic way. As I started to move around I wondered why my legs felt so stiff. I had promised to start going to gym, but had put off the evil moment repeatedly, with all sorts of valid and tear jerking excuses. But the fact is that I could not blame a new gym regime for the stiffness in my muscles.
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>.
Customers who have a fixed line pay a rental of just under R100 for the copper line that delivers their voice service. Telkom then performs a slight upgrade to this line estimated to cost under R40 in order to allow the customer to receive broadband through the existing copper line.
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.