Search Results for: South Africa

BY MATTHEW BRACE
SOUTH African airports – including Durban and Johannesburg’s international terminals – are using sheepdogs to scare birds from their runways to increase safety and reduce the bill of millions of Rand a year caused by aircraft bird strikes.…

BY RICHARD HURST
THE ZIMBABWE subsidiary of the Rio Tinto Zinc group has announced that it has finalised a study to determine the feasibility of developing a US$35 million open cast diamond mine in the south west of the country. Aaron Mudhuwiwa, spokesman for the company, said that confirmed deposits have two medium sized pipes and a smaller one.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
A LONG-LIST of nine names was being considered this month (January) by the World Health Organisation as potential successors to Gro Harlem Brundtland as director general next year. Dr Brundtland has conducted a relentless campaign against smoking and the organisation may be difficult to elect a similar anti-tobacco crusader given the differences she has had with the US.…

KEITH NUTHALL
INNOVATION is important in the provision of water services, whether that be to prevent the contamination of supplies by a return of this summer’s floods, or to source drinking water for arid areas where ground reserves are running dry.…

BY MARK ROWE
TWO Russian geologists who prepared maps of radioactive pollution in Siberia are to be charged with revealing state secrets. The environmentalists wanted to use the maps and a 107-page report they had compiled to attract attention to increasing radioactivity around a chemical plant involved in the production of nuclear fuel near Angarsk, a town of 300,000 people close to Lake Baikal, south-central Siberia.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INTERNATIONAL scientists coordinated by the Munich-based Max Planck Institute for chemistry has discovered evidence of environmentally damaging high pollution levels over the Mediterranean Sea. They believe high levels of sulphate and soot particles in the troposphere could reduce evaporation of the sea and reduce the amount of rainfall in the Middle East and north Africa.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CONSERVATIONISTS have welcomed a controversial United Nations (UN) report identifying wealthy western companies allegedly involved in wartime projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) they say may endanger rare great apes.

It says Barclays Bank, diamonds giant De Beers, British mining corporation Anglo American, Belgian bankers Fortis, South African miners Iscor, and the United Arab Emirates’ Standard Chartered Bank and 79 other companies have broken OECD multinational good behaviour guidelines by their association with mining, logging or road building in the Congo.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
US poultry producers have slaughtered 9,600 chickens after an outbreak of Newcastle Disease in California, which health officials have been trying to prevent infecting large-scale commercial poultry producers. They have reported that outbreaks were discovered in 25 smallholdings in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.…

BY RICHARD HURST
PRIVATISATION plans for the South African government owned gem-mining company Alexkor are moving ahead; Rain Zihlangu, its chief executive, said that the process has entered its final stage with bidders expected to submit proposals by November 28. The privatisation process is expected to see 51 per cent go to private investors, with the government retaining 39 per cent and the Alexander Bay Development Fund snapping up10 per cent.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
A SENIOR Sri Lankan government official has warned his country’s construction industry that it faces running out of sand unless it stops over-exploiting river deposits and fails to develop extraction from the seabed offshore.

Janapriya de Silva, Chairman of the island’s Geological Survey and Mines Bureau, has warned: “We could run short of sand in another two years’ time.”…