Italy’s gay activists on Sunday organised a sit-in ”with collective kissing” at the Colosseum to protest against the arrest of two men, for what police described as an ”oral relationship”. They risk being tried for public indecency, punishable by up to two years in jail.
The Gauteng provincial housing department has pledged R85-million towards the development of four hostels in the province. Provincial housing minister Nomvula Mokonyane held talks with African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party supporters who lived in hostels where a number of protests took place earlier this month.
At five feet tall, Asma Jahangir is not an imposing figure, but for almost four decades she has towered over Pakistan’s human rights war. She has championed battered wives, rescued teenÂagers from death row, defended people accused of blasphemy and sought justice for the victims of honour killings. These battles have won her admirers and enemies in great number.
Shaun Liebenberg is the turnaround guy. He’s in charge of spearheading Denel’s restructuring and consolidation. If he pulls it off, he’ll have led one of local business’s biggest success stories. Problem is, that’s a big if. Denel made a R549-million loss this year, which is a significant improvement over last year’s loss of R1,36-billion, but it’s far from turning a profit.
Fancy a nostalgic train safari to Mpumalanga or Victoria Falls? Better not get your hopes up, warn private train tour operators. They complain that a shortage of locomotives, coupled with poor planning, has made business conditions increasingly difficult. While major players are known to be affected, smaller operators have had to close down.
This year’s winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko, speaks to Stephanie Wolters about her winning story, some of the issues she feels strongly about waht motivates her as an African writer.
Hanno Renn, a Freiburg taxi driver, invested in a communal solar electricity system on a building in the German town in 1993. "Everyone laughed and said I was wasting my money," he says. But now he has paid off his investment and earns a regular income from the electrical company for the power he generates. "I have had the last laugh," he grins.
Using renewable energy can be expensive, but households can start managing their energy requirements by considering both the demand and supply side of the equation. They can diversify through using renewable sources and the most energy-efficient options. The house becomes the power plant and the shortfall is sourced from the grid.
In a classic American western, there are good guys and bad guys. The good ones are the settlers, who are making the prairie bloom; the bad ones are the Indians, who are blood-thirsty savages. The hero is the cowboy — with a big revolver or two, ready to defend himself at all times.
It is a party trick well known to curious teenagers across the United States. Zoom down on Washington via Google Earth and you get an extraordinary eagle-eyed view of the world’s greatest powerhouse. There’s the White House and its West Wing. Sweeping south-east across the Potomac you soar above the Pentagon. But there is one thing you can’t do.