Despite a frightening list of problems there is confidence that Rio will be ready for the Olympic Games – but long-term benefits are in doubt.
The beleagured Workers’ Party believes people will tire quickly of the opposition leaders.
“The first step that should be taken in pregnancies of girls under 13 should be an abortion,” say activists.
The 2014 World Cup has seen unprecedented levels of outrage and debate over poverty, Fifa, commercialism … and occasionally football.
The last episode of Avenida Brasil was a melodrama
A petro-giant is sweet-talking Amazonian villagers blessed with land that has resources worth billions. Jonathan Watts reports.
Only one thing unites those at the People’s Summit — unhappiness over the status quo, writes Jonathan Watts.
A new Global Witness report has revealed that environmental activists were killed at the rate of more than two a week in 2011.
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/ 27 January 2012
China making huge strides in using green energy but coal consumption continues to increase.
A haze expert has warned that despite recent moves to tighten controls on air pollution in urban China, dangerous smog will persist for decades.
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/ 15 December 2011
Chinese villagers have called on their government to intervene in a bloody land dispute that has claimed at least one life so far.
Beijing fears a policy of encirclement as US President Barack Obama announces plans to begin stationing 2 500 troops in northern Australia.
345 000 people are being relocated in a desperate bid to ease Beijing’s drought crisis by transfusing water from the Yangtze basin
An estimated 10 000 people have died in Ishinomaki. <b>Jonathan Watts</b> finds a desperate effort to feed the living as the bodies pile up.
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/ 25 February 2011
China is to impose an environmental tax on heavy polluters under an ambitious clean-up strategy being finalised in Beijing.
No TV. No internet. No air conditioning. Traffic lights off. Hospitals deprived of electricity.
For the first time the government in Beijing has put a hefty value on its forest ecosystems.
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/ 4 December 2009
With just days to go before the Copenhagen climate talks, the world waits for China to set its carbon target.
South Korea’s secretary for future vision is considering how many of his people it takes to change a million lightbulbs. No joke.
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/ 8 February 2008
When Sun Jun ignited a cacophony of fireworks recently, he was letting off steam as much as ushering in the Year of the Rat in the Chinese lunar calendar. For the Beijing taxi driver, two days’ holiday during the spring festival is a rare break in a work schedule that otherwise has him on the road almost every day of the year.
Foul air, filthy water and contaminated soil have led to a surge of tumours in China, where cancer is the main cause of death, the state media reported this week. Raising fears that breakneck economic growth is having a dire impact on the nation’s health, a government survey blamed pollution for a sharp rise in cancer cases.
China plans to produce its own large commercial jet by 2020 to challenge the dominance of Airbus and Boeing in the world’s fastest-growing aircraft market. Beijing has accelerated the development of a home-grown passenger aircraft to compete for the billions of dollars it is spending on foreign planes.
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/ 29 January 2007
One of the most incongruous sights of the globalised age — the Starbucks coffee shop inside Beijing’s Forbidden City — could soon be a thing of the past after a furious online campaign. In response to this demonstration of "netizen” power, the palace’s guardians have announced plans to review the presence of the coffee shop.
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/ 20 November 2006
Put yourself in the shoes of Imelda Marcos. At the height of your power you are the wife of a president, one of the 10 richest women in the world, intimate with the world’s dictators and the owner of arguably the biggest private collection of art — and footwear — on the planet. Then try to squeeze into those sling-backs again today.
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/ 10 November 2006
Strings of diamonds, cascades of champagne and tens of millions of dollars worth of gifts would be con-sidered ostentatious at any wedding. But in Burma, one of the poorest countries in Asia, the luxury on display in a video of the wedding laid on by the head of the junta, General Than Shwe, for his daughter, has left people up in arms.
Police are ordering that Beijing’s galleries remove political art from their walls, writes Jonathan Watts.
"Soccer runs in our family’s veins," says proud dad Ozzie Liebestein. And sometimes outside his family’s veins, too, by the looks of things: five minutes into the interview the nasty gash to his forehead is still oozing. Most fathers might have had a few sharp words to say to their sons had they too been felled by a roundhouse kick to the mandible, but Ozzie will hear none of it.
South African football bosses have unanimously committed themselves to keeping unwelcome attitudes and influences out of the local game. "Victrocentrism" — the disturbing desire to win matches — has been identified as a major threat to local football.
The International Space Station (ISS) is missing and nobody is terribly sure where it has gone. In an extraordinary press conference at Cape Canaveral this week, Nasa admitted that the last communication from the two astronauts on board was more than 48 hours ago and was said to be: “Hey, what’s going on? You guys didn’t say you were sending a shuttle.”
The Department of Education has announced that the next and necessary phase of its futuristic policy will be introduced on a trial basis during the second half of this year. The new phase is called Incomes-Based Education and will be exactly what it sounds like. The more the learner pays, the more the learner gets taught.
In an unexpected move that caught political commentators on the back foot, President Thabo Mbeki made a surprise visit to South Africa last Wednesday. His unannounced arrival was leaked to <i>Not the Mail & Guardian</i> by a part-time hangar-sweeper at the South African Air Force base at Swartkops, outside Tshwane.
Troops loyal to South African presidential hopeful Jacob Zuma have arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo in preparation for a coup against the incumbent President, Joseph Kabila. The African National Congress Youth League is keen to find new sources of income with which to foot the bill for its "babe magnet" BMWs.