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/ 13 November 2006
Workers’ skeletons litter the mines of this land. Many of those killed underground were never retrieved; their families never had the opportunity to bury them decently, according to African rituals and tradition. In the worst disasters the recovered mineworkers are often unidentifiable and those families that insist on remains for ritual burials risk interring the wrong body.
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/ 13 November 2006
Australia’s blistering summer has only just begun, but reservoir levels are dropping fast, crop forecasts have been slashed, and great swathes of the continent are entering what scientists this week called a "one-in-1 000-years drought”. With many regions now in their fifth year of drought, the government called an emergency water summit in Canberra.
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/ 13 November 2006
Rumour has it that Tony Leon is leaving the DA to start a new party called the Neo-Malthusians. Its founding credo aims to make all South Africans rich because poor people take up too much space, eat too much food and drink too much water. The new party is inspired by the ideas of political economist Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 postulated that high fertility among the poor was responsible for stripping the Earth’s resources.
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/ 13 November 2006
Palestinian student Huda Abu El-Roos enrolled at Bethlehem University in the occupied West Bank in 2003. But Abu El-Roos, who lives in the Gaza Strip, has never set foot inside the campus. Citing security reasons, Israel has prohibited the 21-year-old and nine colleagues from attending classes on occupational therapy in the biblical town.
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/ 13 November 2006
Worried about the country’s dented image and the slump in the economy, the government of Swaziland has appointed a team of eminent persons to advise both King Mswati III and his government on economic and business issues. The mandate for the team of 20, is to advise the king and government on political issues as well as on measures to encourage economic growth and curb poverty.
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/ 13 November 2006
In the 1970s, the Club of Rome and others warned of the coming dire scarcity of food, oil and other essentials — the seemingly inexorable consequence of rising demand for limited resources. More recently, we have heard forecasts of inevitable ”water wars”, predictions rooted in fears that there is simply not enough fresh water to meet the needs of an expanding and quickly urbanising global population.
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/ 13 November 2006
As the October rains finally rolled in over Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, last week, storm clouds of a different kind were gathering over the country’s universities. Learning ground to a halt and students were sent home as lecturers entered their second week of industrial action over stagnating salaries.
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/ 13 November 2006
When the Maldives features in the media it is usually in the form of a paean to its silver sands, its magical island resorts in the crystal-clear waters of the Indian Ocean. Little is heard of the ways in which journalists who challenge the omnipotence of the government are harassed and suppressed.
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/ 13 November 2006
”I am going to charge you with the murder of that dead person.” With these words Superintendent Ngubane of the Booysens police station turned what had been just another dreary encounter with dysfunctional police into a full-on fight over the state of policing in Gauteng. I am a Quaker and on Friday evening, November 3, I was attending a meeting in Rosettenville, writes Justine White.
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/ 13 November 2006
Having just been given yet another year in office — albeit with slightly diluted powers — Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo is quickly becoming Africa’s Houdini. Until mid year, the chance that Gbagbo would be given a second extension of his already prolonged mandate was considered unlikely. However, this is exactly what African leaders eventually called for and what the United Nations Security Council agreed to when it passed Resolution 1721 late last month.