Sports teams are known to lift the psyche of a nation when they’re winning, and send it into a state of depression when they are losing, but how are magazines sales affected? Stuart Graham looks at the dynamics of the sports print market.
By the time 2050 rolls around, current decision-makers will either be dead or stuck in old-age homes. Yet the decisions they make today will have a significant effect on the economic and environmental future. According to the International Energy Agency current emission policies, such the Kyoto Treaty, will not put the world on a path towards a sustainable future by 2050.
Ours is a coal culture. We have an abundance of the stuff, enough to make tons of electricity and supply a big chunk of our fuel needs as well. Our electricity is among the cheapest anywhere costing, say, just 20% of what they pay in Europe. So cheap that it has been used as an investment tool. Come here for cheap electricity, investors are told.
Violet Mthembu, who cares for three people every day, says that many of the sick and aged she looks after are either physically or economically incapable of collecting water from one of the stand pipes dotting the township — the only place where residents can access running water. "Some people have [prepaid] cards, but for others it’s too expensive, so we use our own cards," she says.
Israel was fighting on two fronts this week as one military disaster piled on another. Lebanese militia killed and captured troops on Israel’s northern border while the army launched a fresh ground assault into the Gaza Strip in pursuit of a third abducted soldier.
A British drug company is seeking permission to conduct the first human trials of an experimental vaccine against the avian flu virus. The vaccine will target the lethal H5N1 strain of avian flu, which has spread rapidly throughout bird popu-lations in Asia and has been brought to Europe by flocks of migrating waterfowl.
”The one with the diarrhoea opens the door” might seem an unlikely sentence in a book explaining biblical scriptures. So too essays on witchcraft, rape, ancestral worship and female genital mutilation. But Africa Bible Commentary, a new 1 600-page tome, provides explanations of verses from all 66 books of the Bible, using local proverbs and idioms.
Heads or tails? The editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley bible Wired, and the man who has written the clearest explanation yet of the shift from the one-size-fits-all, mass-media world to a diverse, complex world of millions of niches, is keeping both options covered.
Lesotho’s single largest employer, the textile industry, has made a remarkable comeback, setting an example for the region and giving thousands back their jobs. Lesotho was an early victim of cheap Chinese exports to the key United States market when the World Trade Organisation’s 30-year-old Multi-Fibre Agreement expired last year.
Considering that the world has been wanting to see her without her clothes for more than 50 years, I reckon there should be few complaints at Sophia Loren now finally deciding, at close on 72, to pose for a picture in the Pirelli calendar. It remains unclear what precise state of déshabillement she is intending.