Walking into the Angolan capital’s main maternity hospital, the first thing that hits any visitor is the stench: a nauseating combination of blood and excrement. After a short while, the stomach settles and the eyes adjust to the poor light in the Maternidade Lucrecia Paim; then, the true wretchedness of the grey walls and broken windows begins to sink in.
I was recently on a discussion programme with a fully signed-up card-carrying feminist. ”Damn,” she said, as we came off, ”I said ‘husbands’ by mistake, instead of ‘partners’.” She’d made the ultimate faux pas — the assumption that couples must be married. But is it right, particularly when so many feminists — like herself — have chosen to get married, that marriage should continue to be taboo?
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/ 28 February 2006
The irrigation water boozed by South Africa’s burgeoning golf-course estates would satisfy the basic water needs of at least 75% of South Africans, a few simple sums indicate. According to Tony Vaughan, publisher of The Property Magazine, each golf course consumes between 1,5-million and two million litres of water a day.
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/ 28 February 2006
Against a background of rising rural unrest, China recently unveiled ambitious plans to help the 800-million people living in the countryside catch up economically with people in the cities. More rural investment, agricultural subsidies and improved social services are the main planks of a policy to create a ”new socialist countryside”.
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/ 28 February 2006
The recent violence surrounding the publication in the West of caricatures of the prophet Muhammad illustrate the danger of Islamic ”totalitarianism”, Salman Rushdie and a group of other writers said in a statement obtained on Tuesday. ”After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism,” they wrote.
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/ 28 February 2006
Suspects who allegedly sabotaged a generator at Koeberg power station which has triggered months of off-and-on power outages in the Western Cape have been identified, the 702 radio station quoted Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin as saying on Tuesday.
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/ 28 February 2006
South Africa on Tuesday said the European Union’s plans to send a security force to back United Nations peacekeepers during upcoming elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were unwarranted as troops from the region could provide the necessary support.
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/ 28 February 2006
The Pretoria High Court on Tuesday dismissed urgent applications by four municipalities to stop the transfer of their assets and services to other provinces. The Merafong Demarcation Forum applied to restrain government from handing over at midnight on Tuesday their assets and service duties from Gauteng to the North West province.
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/ 28 February 2006
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The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in the Western Cape is planning to conduct Wednesday’s municipal election as if there will be no power available in the province. ”We are planning for no electricity. That is the safest,” provincial electoral officer Courtney Sampson told a media briefing in Bellville on Tuesday afternoon.