It was a new kind of story. Not in the sense of what happened, which was thoroughly and depressingly as anticipated, but in the way it was reported and disseminated. The mobile phone photographers, the text messagers and the bloggers – a new advance guard of amateur reporters had the London bomb story in the can before the news crews got anywhere near the scene.
Nasa controllers on Sunday night set the countdown clock ticking to the first shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster. Crew safety has become the priority of the national space agency in the two and a half years since seven astronauts were lost when Columbia blew apart during re-entry over Texas.
So there’s this Indian chap who goes to dog training with us on Sundays when everyone else is in church. His wife, who is not Indian, sends him there. She has put him on the 20-week dog training course to punish him for his regular Saturday night binges, which leaves him with a Sunday morning hangover and what one might politely call dog breath.
Hurricane Dennis sent Gulf coast residents fleeing on Sunday, but spared the region the worst of the predicted devastation after it weakened shortly before landfall. The hurricane, which left 32 people in Haiti and Cuba dead, arrived in Alabama and northwestern Florida packing 192kph winds, pounding the beachfronts in an area that was hit by Hurricane Ivan just 10 months ago.
Fords new Territory has arrived, and — on paper at least — it seems like a good ‘un, as long as you can afford the fuel. Available only with a four-litre 182 kW six-cylinder in-line engine pinched from the Falcon, the Territory comes in two- wheel and four-wheel-drive derivatives.
"If I happen to be in an accident and I become a vegetable, I would like my partner to have a right to my belongings," says Darren Hayward, a gay South African who has been in a committed relationship for the past six years. Hayward, like other gay and lesbian South Africans, is looking forward to good news from the Constitutional Court later this year regarding same-sex marriages.
BMW has produced, in the R1200 RT, a machine that is light years ahead of the R1150 RT, the model it replaces. With its flat twin now displacing 1 170cc and generating 81 kW (110 bhp) and 115 Nm of torque it’s a truly formidable high-speed touring machine. Apart from the extra power and torque delivered by the bigger engine.
Recently, ministerial housing delegates from South Africa, Brazil and India put their heads together in Cape Town to come up with a united proposal for slum eradication ahead of the United Nations meeting on Millennium Development Goals in September. The political fight at that meeting is expected to be over the proposed reduction by 10% of the estimated 100-million slum-dwellers worldwide.
A hard-hitting study has found that trade union investment companies have a prodigious R2-billion asset base but, in general, lack a ”union agenda”. The findings were presented at a Cosatu central executive committee meeting in May and have been kept under wraps. However, a preliminary copy was leaked to the Labour Bulletin, which will print them this week.
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related ”global” events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Following the media in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings.