Sports fields too hard to play on, gardens that have dried up and plumbing so bereft of water that every bathroom smells — this is the reality of drought in Goulburn, on track to be the first Australian city to die of thirst. Four years into the country’s worst drought in 60 years, the historic township in inland New South Wales is now so dry that its water supply will only last about eight months.
The Live 8 campaign by Bob Geldof, the narcissistic fading rock star, ”to make poverty history” was naively admirable but also somewhat disturbing to watch. Here was a dynamic individual who was helping to perpetuate the stereotype of the ”dark continent” as a helpless place of poverty and disease which the white musical missionaries of a new age would help to overcome.
So, in an instant, the pages of history were reordered. London bomb coverage, pages one to 16; Africa and climate change, pages 17 to 18. If the bombers wanted both to mark the G8 summit and push it into seeming irrelevance by blowing something up, then that was mission accomplished. But Africa was not, is not and will not be irrelevant.
The last time Julia Segal was forced from her home it was by Adolf Hitler. As Jews, her parents had particular reason to fear the Nazi assault that drove the family from Ukraine in 1941. Segal settled in Moscow and in time made her name as a sculptor of mournful but non-political works. They can still be seen in the hilltop art gallery of her latest home, the isolated Jewish settlement of Sa Nur in the West Bank.
Last year I attended a conference in the United States about security and intelligence in the so-called war on terror and was astonished to hear one of the more belligerent participants, who as far as I could tell had nothing but contempt for religion, strongly argue that as a purely practical expedient, politicians and the media must stop referring to ”Muslim terrorism”.
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A partial building collapse spewed tonnes of rubble and timber on to a busy New York City sidewalk on Thursday, injuring at least four people and triggering an urgent search-and-rescue mission. The building was under demolition and surrounded by scaffolding when the collapse occurred.
Johannesburg is expected to be the 12th-largest city in the world by 2015, Minister of Housing Lindiwe Sisulu said on Thursday. ”Paradoxically, Gauteng is known to be the smallest province geographically,” Sisulu said in a speech prepared for delivery at a Gauteng housing summit.
The mass evictions from a building in Bree Street in central Johannesburg are ”utterly barbaric” and unconstitutional, a legal expert said at the site on Thursday afternoon. Stuart Woolfson, of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, said to evict people without giving them interim shelter is cruel and an abuse of human rights.
A male Zimbabwean athlete who won several awards in women’s competitions in Southern Africa was on Thursday sentenced to four years in jail for offensive behaviour, the prosecutor said. Samukeliso Sithole (18) was arrested in February after a female friend lodged a complaint to police.