Have you ever stopped to think how many minutes a day you are in contact with no textiles, the fabric of your sofa, bed linen, towels, clothing? Or wondered how these things are produced, and what happens to them when they are discarded? The Cleaner Textile Production Project is quickly addressing the areas of greatest negative impacts, working with cotton growers and textile manufacturers.
Industry-driven policing through a proposed Peat Users’ Association is being mooted to ensure responsible peat mining and use in South Africa. Peat is a type of wetland soil that is high in organic content. Significantly, the vast mires (peat-forming wetlands) of the northern hemisphere hold about a third of the world’s soil carbon. But peat mining is alsp destroying precious wetlands and water resources.
”Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue” is how University of Namibia professor of political studies Bill Lindeke described Namibia’s new government after Hifikepunye Pohamba replaced Sam Nujoma as state president on Monday. A Namibian current affairs magazine has dubbed Pohamba the ”Old Man — Mark II” to show how little things were likely to change.
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After the dust of next week’s election has settled, Zimbabwe’s municipalities face the headache of removing graffiti and posters from trees, walls, billboards, commuter buses, government buildings, shops and pushcarts. There are no catchy messages, but colourful campaign media is everywhere. ”People have already made up their minds,” says one political analyst.
A poll last year found 85% of Americans believe that God created the universe. In Nigeria, 98% claimed always to have believed in God, while nine out of 10 Indonesians said they would die for their religious beliefs. If the figures are even remotely accurate, they illustrate the prevalence of faith in the modern world. It seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain wired for faith.
Japan boasts both the world’s longest average life expectancy — 81,9 years — and has 23Â 000 people aged 100 or more. The United States is still ahead, but what’s surprising in Japan’s case is that its centenarian population has doubled in just five years, and will reach nearly one million — the world’s largest — by 2050, according to United Nations projections.
On the neo-Nazi websites where the teenage loner aired his admiration for Adolf Hitler’s notions of ethnic purity, he was known as Todesengel — German for Angel of Death. Late on Monday, in a secluded Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, he played out those dark fantasies. Jeff Weise (16) shot dead his grandfather, five teenagers, a teacher and two other adults before turning the gun on himself.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s radical blueprint to restructure the world body has received mixed reviews from diplomats, human rights activists and NGOs. ”Millions of people are dying because of conflict and poverty while rich countries are busy jostling for Security Council seats,” said an Oxfam representative. The ”fingerprints” of the superpower are visible in the secretary general’s report, say critics.
In the primate family, to which humankind belongs, there are certain heritage features which display ”clear dominance relationships among members, and the proclivity to imitate”, hence such terms as ”aping and monkey business”. Alienated. Quarrelsome. Spoilers. Certain white males exhibit all the symptoms of the dethroned male baboon.
In case we have forgotten the tragedy, United States President George W Bush has cooked up a farce to remind us that reforming the Bretton Woods institutions is just like building democracy in hot countries. It isn’t a job for the natives. Paul Wolfowitz is Bush’s nominee for the presidency of the World Bank. Since Europe appoints the head of the International Monetary Fund, it effectively means he’s got the job.