The fire that claimed the lives of three Pollsmoor inmates is only part of a cycle of violence that prison staff fear has yet to reach its bloody climax. That climax, they say, may be the stabbing of one of their own colleagues. There have been three fires in the prison’s cavernous admissions centre over the past three days, the first on Sunday and the others — including the fatal one — on Monday afternoon.
An official report on the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal on Tuesday blamed a failure of leadership at the Pentagon for negligence over prison conditions and confusion over interrogation rules which led to Animal House sadism in the Iraqi jail. The report did not pin direct responsibility on the United States defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, by name, nor did it find any top officials legally culpable.
”’Times they are a-changin”’: The once famously private 60s legend Bob Dylan, whose music moved a generation, is poised to tell all in a memoir to be published this autumn. Dylan, who at the age of 63 is planning to go on tour with Willie Nelson this summer, is set to focus on significant and influential periods of his life in the first of three books called simply Chronicles: Volume One, according to his publisher.
The wreckage of a Russian airliner, which went missing on Tuesday night with 46 people on board, has been found near Russia’s southern city of Rostov-on-Don, emergency officials said on Wednesday, hours after another airliner, which crashed at the same time, was found south of Moscow with all 44 aboard dead.
One lucky reader who takes out a subscription to <i>Earthyear</i> magazine before September 15 2004 will win a weekend getaway for two at birders’ paradise
Ndumo Wilderness Camp worth R6 720.
For many years, during apartheid, the Ndumo Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal was an area the local Mathenjwa community avoided, a place that held the animals they were not privileged enough to enjoy. But, when the Ndumo Wilderness Camp was erected in 1995, the community gained a stake in the wildlife that previously had held no interest for them.
American conservationist Mike Fay is a man on a mission: to save Africa’s remaining wild places from further human depredation. To do this, he and co-pilot Peter Ragg will criss-cross the African continent to measure how heavily the human “footprint” has been imprinted in 93 major eco-regions. Maureen Brady meets these human eagles on World Environment Day.
The next time you wake up to find fresh molehills dotted around your garden, you’ll probably see red, but think twice before you scream blue murder. That pesky mole may well be one of several endemic South African species, now critically endangered. But the Red Data Project seeks to change all that.
"Feel like sending United States troops some goodies to help them in their fight against Everyone Else? Yes, I’m being ironic, but it’s still interesting to see the facilities set up to help the US troops online. (Whereas back in South Africa, 89% of the South African National Defence Force isn’t going to be around soon, and our government just shrugs)." Ian Fraser finds some interesting stuff online.
The current world order is essentially about the geopolitics of oil, and the book The End of Oil by Paul Roberts is a tour de force in charting, in a highly readable, balanced and objective manner, a fluid, constantly changing dynamic. We need to face up to the crisis in energy consumption.