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/ 28 November 2005
Amnesia is a wonderful thing. How delicious to hear a spat reaching decibels of hysteria between former <i>Boetie Gaan Border Toe</i> Jannie Geldenhuys and the mild-mannered, high-foreheaded, comfortably chubby former president of Finland, Marti Ahtisaari, who was also the United Nations’s point man in the disputed territory of Namibia.
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/ 28 November 2005
Zimbabwe’s Senate poll is scheduled for this weekend, but there is little sign of the customary heated political activity. Incidents of violence hardly register on the radar screen. Ructions in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) over participation have dominated the run-up to the poll
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/ 28 November 2005
Following a period of sustained criticism for cutting back or cancelling the air-time of gay and Christian groups, SABC national station Radio 2000 has reacted strongly with the assertion that their new programme schedule – implemented this month – fulfils the public broadcasting mandate as dictated by regulator Icasa.
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/ 28 November 2005
This week, 10Â 000 people will start to gather in Montreal for what are expected to be the most important climate-change negotiations since the agreement of the Kyoto protocol in 1997. Put simply, the scientific consensus is that only a small window of opportunity remains to avoid dangerous climate change.
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/ 28 November 2005
If the international experts gathered at the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases Symposium on Tuberculosis in Tanzania last month thought they could smell a rat, they weren’t far off the mark. Perched at the back of the conference centre was a gargantuan beast munching contentedly on a bit of blackened banana.
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/ 28 November 2005
”I am tiring of technocratic talk. Joel Netshitenzhe’s most recent statement, that the government would not change its mind on the provinces it has assigned to cross-border municipalities because to give in to peoples’s demands would be a ‘perverse incentive’, is really so much hogwash,” writes Rapule Tabane.
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/ 28 November 2005
It takes guts to dance in the midst of a baying arena of alcohol-fuelled Australian farmers wearing an oversized daisy pinned to a Superman shirt and oversized shorts held up by crimson braces. To do it when a tonne of angry Brahmin bull is charging towards you with lowered horns takes something close to lunacy.
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/ 28 November 2005
”When I left Japan in 2003, things were looking terminally gloomy. For most of the previous seven years reporting from Tokyo, I had written an unrelenting stream of miserable stories about salarymen suicides, zombie companies and a corrupt one-party political system dying slowly from sclerosis,” writes The Guardian‘s Jonathan Watts.
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/ 28 November 2005
Michelle Bachelet was a 23-year-old medical student in Chile when a gang of military men broke into her house and kidnapped her and her mother, Angela Jeria. It was January 1975, and the Chilean secret police officers were crushing protests and eliminating civilians on the orders of military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
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/ 28 November 2005
The return to Namibia’s Parliament last week of a Swapo leader who was axed from Cabinet — at the height of the presidential succession battle little over a year ago by then head of state Sam Nujoma — has accentuated divisions in the ruling party.
Hidipo Hamutenya arrived at the National Assembly with hordes of cheering supporters making barely disguised jibes at Nujoma.