"Remember the fuss over the Hale-Bopp comet? You couldn’t open a paper without comet-related media or pix — yet right now, there are <i>three</i> comets visible in our night skies at the same time, and there are a couple of asteroids inbound towards Earth. Odd how there seems to be a virtual media blackout on comet information and news." Ian Fraser illuminates the public on these and other oddities.
SABC1 put out a series of documentary briefs last November for its 2004/05 seasons. <i>Family, War Stories, Sex and Secrecy</i>, and <i>Black on White</i> were the titles of the briefs. The brief is clearly not about empowerment, it is rather a patronising and alienating document and its authors assume that there are no accomplished black South African filmmakers.
After the sun slinks behind the horizon, bands of female anopheles mosquitoes rise from their fetid breeding grounds to wage war on the human species. An insatiable lust for blood ensures the continuation of their type, but their victims can face a consequence more ominous than a sting and an itch. We take a closer look at a multi-pronged approach that has won a small victory against malaria.
It has been a long wait, 38 years to be exact, for the Air Quality Bill to rise from the ashes of the Air Pollution Protection Act of 1966. In February lobbyists ensured that the Bill was not rushed through Parliament until specific details were properly addressed. "We have waited so long for this Bill, we want to do this right," said Bobby Peek of the environmental justice group, groundWork.
"The City of Johannesburg’s official website claims renewing licences has been made "hassle free" with no more lengthy queues. I arrive at 7.40am. A 12m queue runs along the pavement, making me wonder if I should pay the queue-for-you entrepreneurs to do this for me." In the second of a series on delivery of basic services, our reporter puts licensing departments to the test.
In KwaZulu-Natal, where politics is conducted in hush-hush tones, locals –particularly the old and the uneducated — have invented a street language that says more about politics than do any number of pundits. The language they have invented is the language that tells of their struggles for survival. Thabo Mbeki is referred to as ”the man who gives us grants [ubaba weqolo]”.
There’s only one ”good” way to give birth — and that is ”naturally”, without pain relief, preferably at home and certainly not by Caesarean section. At least that’s what I was left thinking after reading natural childbirth guru Sheila Kitzinger. She, of course, gave birth to her first child in just two and a half hours, and says that she didn’t expect a painless birth but knew that she could cope.
Radical change is difficult to manage at the best of times — as anybody working in the civil service over the past 10 years will know. When it means separating people from their money, and tackling vested interests, the fallout can be really messy. So it is with the regulation of medicines.The confusion over the regulation of medicines serves neither consumers nor doctors.
Ariel Sharon’s crowd would say that people are unfair to Israel — and the solution equally straightforward: the world should get off Israel’s back. But I draw a different conclusion. It is right to hold Israel to a high standard, right to expose the daily brutalities of occupation. But that standard must be applied equally. But if Israel can be branded an occupier, then so are the United States and Britain, writes Jonathan Freedland.
I confess I used it myself. For a while after the invasion of Iraq it became the smug cliche du jour: Britain, according to this little nugget of conventional wisdom, was the ”gentle occupier”. With pride we pointed out that 30 years in Northern Ireland had taught the British army the softly, softly approach to ruling potentially hostile territory.