South Africa

10,000 workers from the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union ended their protected strike [SUB REQ.]:

Architects: Cornell University Sustainable Design Location: Johannesburg, South Africa Year: 2011 Photographs: Courtesy of Cornell University Sustainable Design Professors: Jeremy Foster, Kifle G Gebremedhin, Werner Goehner, George Hascup, Alex Mergold, Arthur Ovaska, Andrea Simitch Students: Barry Beagen (Project Director), Andrew Fu (Lead Designer), Shuping Liu (Construction Drawing Coordinator), Thomas Shouler (Structural Engineer), Jonathan Leape (Construction Manager), Mikey Jiang (Utilities), Karen Chi-Chi Lin (Marketing and Communications), Carly Dean (Exhibition Director and On-Site Safety Manager), Jesse McElwain (Director of Development) Sidney Beaty, ?Joe Beaudette, Yen Chiang, Christine Chung, Alex Cote,? Jorge Cuervo Manrique, Mercedes Cuvi,? Will Dibernardo, Robert Dicker,? Juliette Dubroca, ?Mary Bray Erickson, Ben Fleury, ?Jessica Fracassini, Stephanie Glass, Stephanie Gitto, Mikhail Grinwald, Wendy Gu,? Peter Gudonis,? Laura Hammerer, Donald Hicks,? Wei-Yen Hsieh, Siyabonga Jezile, Alexandrea Klimoski, Yoonjee Koh, ?Joecyln Kuo,? Tiffany Kuo,? Johnny Lau,? Brian Lee,? Michael Lee,? Jacqueline Liu,? Daniel Lu,? Erin Pellegrino, ?Lexi Quint,? Jake Rudin,? Eric Rutgers,? Lillian Simon,? Alex Simpson,? Tito Soto, ?Elliot Sperling,? Carina Steinhoff, ?Jose Tijerina,?Daniel Torres,? Maria Villarraga,? Shu Wang Local Construction Team: Ntumeko Fodom, Siyabonga Jezile, Beerlina Kedibone, Thobelahi Kotji, Anthony Longo, Oupa Mabuza, Patience Mahlangu, Tlantla Mahlangu, Winnie Mdekazi, Adill Mike, Apacia Ndubane, Mouso Nkosi, Looseboy Nthogelany, Lefa Phogole,Rejinah Seefane, Dinah Sefularo, Kara Schnoes, Tshepo Simon, Victor Ubisi Concept Design: Andrew Fu in collaboration with Nicholas Cassab-Gheta, Manuela Garcia, Abigail Jean, Lingbo Sun, and Yoana Taseva under the guidance of Professor Arthur Ovaska Armadillo Crèche is the design for an early childhood development (ECD) center in Johannesburg, South Africa. It accommodates 80 children and houses a teacher-training center. Standing on an elevated site, the ECD center is a beacon for education. To embrace the necessity of a fence, the design likens itself to an armadillo: it curls in on itself, protecting its soft underbelly with a hard shell. The design integrates the boundary condition with the buildings and landscape, creating zones of different scales for various activities as it unfurls. At the heart of the ECD center lie communal programs: a semi-outdoor dining space and a paved play area. These communal spaces are angled to open up to views of the natural conservation zone. The school is a product of a two year process orchestrated by Cornell University Sustainable Design, an interdisciplinary student-led organization at Cornell University. Students, with the help of academic advisors and industry professionals, executed the project through a semester of research, a semester of design development integrated into the Bachelor of Architecture comprehensive design studio curriculum, and three months of construction. Students collaborated with local partners in construction and education to refine the design. Over thirty student volunteers traveled to South Africa to construct the school alongside local laborers from the surrounding neighborhood, Cosmo City. Strong emphasis is placed on sustainable passive sustainable technologies to decrease cost and energy dependency. Conscientious decisions in resiliency are found in all dimensions of the project: the architectural design, construction methods, material production and purchasing, included facilities, project financing and day-to-day operations. (A year after construction, the ECD center was still not connected to the grid. The teachers, however, were not worried: they explained that these passive technologies create a bright, warm, and efficacious school without the use of electricity.) This project was completed with generous support from Cornell University, in partnership with Education Africa, Pla

by Kameron Hurley I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves–lemming-like–over cliffs to drown in the surging sea. They are, at heart, sea creatures, birthed from the sea, married to it like the fishing people who make their livelihood there. Every story you hear about llamas is the same. You see it in books: the poor doomed baby llama getting chomped up by its intemperate parent. On television: the massive tide of scaly llamas falling in a great, majestic herd into the sea below. In the movies: bad-ass llamas smoking cigars and painting their scales in jungle camouflage. Because you’ve seen this story so many times, because you already know the nature and history of llamas, it sometimes shocks you, of course, to see a llama outside of these media spaces. The llamas you see don’t have scales. So you doubt what you see, and you joke with your friends about “those scaly llamas” and they laugh and say, “Yes, llamas sure are scaly!” and you forget your actual experience. What you remember is the llama you saw who had mange, which sort of looked scaly, after a while, and that one llama who was sort of aggressive toward a baby llama, like maybe it was going to eat it. So you forget the llamas that don’t fit the narrative you saw in films, books, television – the ones you heard about in the stories – and you remember the ones that exhibited the behavior the stories talk about. Suddenly, all the llamas you remember fit the narrative you see and hear every day from those around you.  You make jokes about it with your friends. You feel like you’ve won something. You’re not crazy. You think just like everyone else. And then there came a day when you started writing about your own llamas. Unsurprisingly, you didn’t choose to write about the soft, downy, non-cannibalistic ones you actually met, because you knew no one would find those “realistic.” You plucked out the llamas from the stories. You created cannibal llamas with a death wish, their scales matted in paint. It’s easier to tell the same stories everyone else does. There’s no particular shame in it. It’s just that it’s lazy, which is just about the worst possible thing a spec fic writer can be. Oh, and it’s not true. ••• As somebody with more than a passing knowledge of history (All the Thing That Came Before Me), I’m passionately interested in truth: truth is something that happens whether or not we see it, or believe it, or write about. Truth just is. We can call it something else, or pretend it didn’t happen, but its repercussions live with us, whether we choose to remember and acknowledge it or not. When I sat down with one of my senior professors in Durban, South Africa to talk about my Master’s thesis, he asked me why I wanted to write about women resistance fighters. “Because women made up twenty percent of the ANC’s militant wing!” I gushed. “Twenty percent! When I found that out I couldn’t believe it. And you know – women have never been part of fighting forces –” He interrupted me. “Women have always fought,” he said. “What?” I said. “Women have always fought,” he said. “Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.” I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate Women’s History courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especi

If Google had its way, everyone in the world would be on the Internet, using Google services. To bring that goal to fruition, Google is reportedly working to build cellular networks in Africa and Southeast Asia to help bring hundreds of millions of people online for the first time. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is in talks with countries like Kenya and South Africa to fund and deploy cellular networks in those countries, using wireless spectrum reserved for television broadcasts. Bone deep in Google’s business strategy is that the more people that use the Web, the more Google benefits. That is why the company is testing its Google Fiber high-speed Internet access in various locations in the United States and why it bid in U.S. wireless spectrum auctions in 2007 and 2008. Google has long been planning to enter the cellular service market and there is no better testing ground than those portions of the planet that still lack Internet access. Owning The Plumbing Google’s play is to not only own what you do on the Internet, but the pipes you use to access it. Google would provide much of the critical infrastructure, such as the base stations and processors involved in building the networks, the Wall Street Journal reports. It could also employ “high-altitude platforms” – blimps and balloons – that could broadcast cellular signals for hundreds of miles. Google could also build out the network using satellites, a technique that a many remote areas use to quickly add telecommunications services. If Google can get the populations of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia on the Internet, it can then sell low-cost Android devices into those regions through its manufacturing partners like Samsung, LG, ZTE, HTC and Huawei. Once those eyeballs are online, Google hopes to find ways to make money from them with its advertising and search products. Google could also push various Android services to these newly connected Internet users. The Android Google Play app store is able to accept payments in 134 countries - giving the company the ability to sell apps, books, music and video to a large portion of the world’s population. In the end, this is a pure volume move for Google: get more people the capability to get online, give them a portal to do so (smartphones) and get them using Google.

Trade union Hospersa has demanded an apology from KwaZulu-Natal Health MEC Sibongiseni Dhlomo for shutting down two radiotherapy machines at Durban's Addington Hospital.

MPs should join other respected local and international groups to push for the decriminalisation of prostitution, rights activists have told Parliament's joint committee on HIV/Aids.

The ruling party wants reliable cadres to take South Africa into the future, says ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe.

A Zambian truck driver who was forced to kick, bite and stab his way from the clutches of a giant python, says he is lucky to be alive.

The public has a right to know whether various imported meat products, including water buffalo, donkey and horse meat, are "potentially harmful", the DA says.

You might have thought Google’s gigabit fiber plans in the U.S. were big, but Google may have even bigger broadband ambitions in the developing world. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Google is working with governments and local regulators in countries all over Africa and Southeast Asia to build wireless networks that would connect the unconnected. The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Google plans to make use of white spaces, the spectrum between TV transmissions that many governments are allocating for wireless broadband use, as well as satellites and aerial transmitters located on balloons or blimps. Finally, Google is developing low-cost devices and processors that will allow even the most resource-limited populace to take advantage of those networks. The Journal states Google aims to connect a billion or more people to the internet through the effort. That strikes me as a big exaggeration. If Google is working with the types of technologies the Journal listed, it would be working with very limited capacities. Satellite broadband provides a finite bandwidth at extremely high cost, and aerial platforms would be constrained by their backhaul – you can’t run fiber to a tower suspended in the sky. White spaces definitely show promise, and Google has already begun trials of the technology in South Africa. Google may even be weighing the use of white spaces in its U.S. broadband strategy. But in most countries there’s a limited amount of spectrum available for white space transmission, and in general its use is limited to rural areas where there’s less chance of it interfering with TV signals. The Journal stated that Google is focusing its efforts primarily in rural areas, but if Google really plans to connect a billion unconnected people, it would also need to hit urban centers. Still, even if Google’s plans is a quarter as ambitious as the Journal claims, it could have an enormous impact on the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3G and 4G cellular is practically non-existent, which has led carriers like Airtel to invest heavily in cheaper unlicensed technologies like Wi-Fi, and wireline broadband available only commercial centers. Using these technologies, Google won’t be able to provide the broadband connections we in the U.S. accustomed to at home, work or on wireless networks, but for millions of people Google could provide their first internet connections. White space image courtesy of Flickr user Cillian Storm. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Why retailers should forget showrooming and turn to in-store Wi-FiTablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016Survey: How apps can solve photo management