Greg Neale and James Burton writes in the Guardian: Elephant poaching in Africa and Asia is being fuelled by China’s economic boom, according to a study of the ivory trade. Authors of…
Africa
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA: Twenty one years after Nelson Mandela walked free, corruption has become the issue du jour in South Africa. Even president Jacob Zuma who narrowly slithered out of a corruption…
A chilling urban legend from New York City comes terribly true on the opposite side of the globe, as three-foot rats run amok, feasting on human babies. The Daily Mail writes: Giant…
What do you get when you combine identity theft and email fraud with black magic, spells, and shape shifting? The explosively popular West African subculture known as Sakawa. Via Motherboard, who filmed…
Alasdair Wilkins writes in io9: There’s fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them….
An interesting tactic in controlling population growth, but how does one come up with a slogan for a campaign supporting both vasectomies and HIV prevention? Stop the spread of disease and babies?…
Site editor’s note: This post from DJ Pangburn originally appeared on death + taxes. What a joy it is to see some businesses doing well as the corpse of capitalism slowly re-animates……
Via BBC News:
The UN refugee agency is to start an emergency airlift of tents to the West African nation of Benin this week, amid the worst flooding there in decades.
Some 3,000 tents will be flown in from Denmark to provide shelter for some of the estimated 680,000 people affected.
Two-thirds of Benin has suffered from months of heavy rain, and about 800 cases of cholera have been reported.
It is the worst flooding to hit the country — one of the poorest in the world — since 1963.
Areas previously thought not to be vulnerable to flooding have been devastated and villages wiped out.
“There are huge areas that are covered in water so people are living on the tops of their houses, because people try to stay near their homes,” Helen Kawkins of the Care aid agency told the BBC.
This is quite a shocker, reported by Godfrey Olukya and Jason Straziuso for AP, especially as it seems to have been instigated by American Christian fundamentalists: KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — The front-page…
In the Central African Republic, broadband internet service costs 3891% of the average monthly income. Put another way, a month’s broadband service costs more than three years’ average wages in the country,”…
Alan Mascarenhas writes on Newsweek:
It takes a lot to snap people out of apathy about Africa’s problems. But in the wake of Live Aid and Save Darfur, a new cause stands on the cusp of going mainstream. It’s the push to make major electronics companies (manufacturers of cell phones, laptops, portable music players, and cameras) disclose whether they use “conflict minerals” — the rare metals that finance civil wars and militia atrocities, most notably in Congo.
The issue of ethical sourcing has long galvanized human-rights groups. In Liberia, Angola, and Sierra Leone, the notorious trade in “blood diamonds” helped fund rebel insurgencies. In Guinea, bauxite sustains a repressive military junta. And fair-labor groups have spent decades documenting the foreign sweatshops that sometimes supply American clothing stores. Yet Congo raises especially disturbing issues for famous tech brand names that fancy themselves responsible corporate citizens.
A key mover behind the Congo campaign is the anti-genocide Enough Project: witness its clever spoof of the famous Apple commercial.
At what point do people need a fix so bad that they are willing to inject another person’s blood into themselves? With the constant presence of AIDS related deaths in Africa, and…
For over the past 5 years, scientific researchers have been observing an ocean in the making. Scientists at the Royal Society, claim that the African continent will be split in two based…
Tom Odula writes on the AP: Attackers in Burundi chopped off the limbs of a 5-year-old albino boy and pulled out his mother’s eye, killing them over the belief that their body…
Scientists have found amber containing perfectly-preserved 95-million-year-old bugs. From Wired Science: Suspended in the stream of time were ancestors of modern spiders, wasps and ferns, but the prize is a wingless ant…
From HBO’s Funny Or Die Presents, the lesson learned from this episode featuring the USA and Africa is: “If you have natural resources, then you’ll receive food…”
By Malcolm Ritter for AP via comcast.net News: Scientists who decoded the DNA of some southern Africans have found striking new evidence of the genetic diversity on that continent, and uncovered a…
The New York Times has an article on a kid raised as a Southern Baptist in small town Alabama who grew up to become an Al Qaeda-aided Jihadist leader in Somalia: As…
From Yahoo News: JOHANNESBURG – A U.N.-backed Congolese military operation to oust rebels from eastern Congo has caused more civilian casualties than damage to rebels, with more than 1,400 people deliberately killed…
By LiveScience Staff A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm. The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and…