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South Africa has about five times more reptile species than would be expected for a country of its size, and many of them are endemic (found only here). But scientists know very little about their conservation status and they are increasingly under threat from development, climate change and collectors.
It was announced last week that Michael Markovitz, former special advisor to Icasa chairperson Mandla Langa, has been appointed director of convergence at listed private media company Primedia. Markovitz informs <i>eMedia,</i> that he began as an official Primedia employee on July 1, which is one day after his six-year contract with the regulator ended.
Iran’s new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is one. So are Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. These men, we are told by CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the London Financial Times, are "hardliners". But what exactly is a hardliner — and why are some world leaders hardliners and others not?
When asked if one likes Harry Potter, it is always a temptation to reply that in order to like somebody, one first has to meet them and given JK Rowling’s profound inability to write characters — indeed, to write anything at all — it is clear that I will wait for my introduction to Master Potter in vain.
The wind blows, sucking little particles from the earth’s surface, throwing them up as dust. On a gentle slope at Caledonia farm, 35km east of Harare, 500 families are tucked away in flimsy plastic shelters in this no-man’s-land, far away from the world’s gaze.
Sports fields too hard to play on, gardens that have dried up and plumbing so bereft of water that every bathroom smells — this is the reality of drought in Goulburn, on track to be the first Australian city to die of thirst. Four years into the country’s worst drought in 60 years, the historic township in inland New South Wales is now so dry that its water supply will only last about eight months.
The Live 8 campaign by Bob Geldof, the narcissistic fading rock star, ”to make poverty history” was naively admirable but also somewhat disturbing to watch. Here was a dynamic individual who was helping to perpetuate the stereotype of the ”dark continent” as a helpless place of poverty and disease which the white musical missionaries of a new age would help to overcome.
So, in an instant, the pages of history were reordered. London bomb coverage, pages one to 16; Africa and climate change, pages 17 to 18. If the bombers wanted both to mark the G8 summit and push it into seeming irrelevance by blowing something up, then that was mission accomplished. But Africa was not, is not and will not be irrelevant.
The last time Julia Segal was forced from her home it was by Adolf Hitler. As Jews, her parents had particular reason to fear the Nazi assault that drove the family from Ukraine in 1941. Segal settled in Moscow and in time made her name as a sculptor of mournful but non-political works. They can still be seen in the hilltop art gallery of her latest home, the isolated Jewish settlement of Sa Nur in the West Bank.
Last year I attended a conference in the United States about security and intelligence in the so-called war on terror and was astonished to hear one of the more belligerent participants, who as far as I could tell had nothing but contempt for religion, strongly argue that as a purely practical expedient, politicians and the media must stop referring to ”Muslim terrorism”.