Our small car moves steadily along a tarred road and suddenly jolts on to uneven ground. We are driving west from Matatiele, a small town north of Kokstad, towards the foothills of the Ukhahlamba Drakensberg mountains bordering Kwazulu-Natal and Lesotho. Ada Chan visits a community hiking trail that is crossing new frontiers in the foothills of the mountains.
Rusted sheets of corrugated iron, retro red brick, steel and cement floors set off fashionable fine works of art. Salvaged from demolished structures on site, as well as from rubbish dumps elsewhere, these recycled materials are shaped into funky patterns of living and leisure space. <i>Earthyear</i> visits two stylish renewal projects in Jo’burg that give flair to the concepts "reduce, re-use and recycle".
You won’t catch "Dutch Disease" at a braai — but South Africa is suffering from the malady, or a variant of it. It is most acute in tourist areas, and the antidote is mistakenly believed to reside in the Reserve Bank building in Pretoria. The term refers to a windfall of new wealth that has negative longer-term consequences. And the "wealth effect" is bad news for South Africa.
Southern Africa is responding to its Aids pandemic with new programmes that promoters say must be as adaptable as HIV itself. "Just as HIV mutates, frustrating efforts to come up with a vaccine, so do our prevention, mitigation and treatment efforts have to be flexible and innovative," says Sylvia Kunene, a counsellor with a voluntary testing centre in Nelspruit, South Africa.
The diplomatic community in Kenya has coined a new phrase to describe the country’s new political leadership for its inability to fight corruption. The diplomats describe Kenya as ”a new boat sailing without a functional captain”. The captain, President Mwai Kibaki, promised electorates zero tolerance against corruption. Instead, a new culture of get-rich-quickly, embraced by his cohorts, is setting new records.
I worry when politicians talk about the 1960s; I worry when they are pro-Sixties, because they’re trying to sound hip and young and any minute now they’ll tell you that they tried dope but it wasn’t for them. I worry more when they’re anti-Sixties, because they sound like the right-wing Margaret Thatcher. Carping about the 1960s liberal consensus serves only to distract from what is in fact an attack on human rights.
The United States Democrat challenger for the White House, John Kerry, has raised more money in the past six months than President George W Bush, with his Democratic Party embracing the internet to help it cancel out what is a traditional Republican advantage. Kerry raised more than -million in the first six months of this year.
Hailstones the size of tennis balls are knocking people out in Japan. Shortly afterwards it is snowing in India. But that is only the beginning. But The Day After Tomorrow, a climate change movie released in mid-May, has been winning praise from both the research establishment and the environment movement.
The possibility of an early–season derby between South Africa’s biggest soccer club, Orlando Pirates, and rivals Kaizer Chiefs became a reality when the two teams were kept apart when the draw for the Telkom Charity Cup was made in Johannesburg on Monday.
The second soccer World Cup for the homeless got under way on Sunday in the west Swedish city of Gothenburg with teams from 28 countries competing for the prize. About 300 players are involved, including the homeless, recovering addicts, asylum-seekers and sellers of street newspapers.