Gang violence kill scores in womens' prison, the Black Hole of Calcutta, and US buys Alaska, the headline acts of yesteryear
Freed Nelson Mandela acknowledges the applause on his first visit to the United Nations in New York in 1990. Mandela urged the U.N . to maintain sanctions against South Africa until apartheid is abolished.
On this day in history, June 20
1248 The University of Oxford, the second oldest university in the western world after the University of Bologna, receives its royal charter. They are predated by institutions from the Islamic Golden Age – the University of Al Quaraouiyine, in Fez, Morocco (circa 857–859), and Cairo's Al-Azhar University, founded in 970 or 972.
1631 The Irish village of Baltimore is sacked by pirates from Algeria.
1756 A British garrison is imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta after the Siraj ud-Daulah Nawab of Bengal takes Calcutta from the British. Most of the soldiers die.
1867 US buys Alaska from Russia for $7.2m.
1877 Alexander Graham Bell installs world's first commercial telephone service.
1895 The Kiel Canal, crossing the base of the Jutland peninsula and the busiest artificial waterway in the world, is opened.
1921 At the Imperial Conference in London, Srinivasa Sastri argues for full citizenship rights to Indians in South Africa and other colonies.
1940 Italy tries invading France and fails.
1944 A German V-2 rocket soars 176 km – it's the first man-made object in outer space.
1963 The Soviet Union and US agree to set up the 'red telephone' link between them.
1987 New Zealand beat France 29-9 in final of first Rugby World Cup, in Auckland.
1990 Nelson Mandela and wife, Winnie, are given a ticker-tape parade in New York city as they begin an eight-city fund-raising tour.
1991 The German Bundestag votes to move the seat of government from Bonn to Berlin.
2018 Algeria turns off its internet to stop students cheating during exams.
2020 Highest temperature recorded in the Arctic circle, 38C in Verkhoyansk, Siberia.
2020 A dust cloud from the Sahara desert in North Africa reaches the Caribbean, largest for half a century.
2023 At least 41 women are killed in violence by rival gangs at a prison in Tamara, Honduras.
2023 The site of Julius Caesar's assassination in Rome, the Largo Argentina square, dating back to third century BC, opens to the public for the first time.
2024 The oldest shipwreck ever (3 300 years old) is found in the Mediterranean.
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IOL News
22-06-2025
- IOL News
Advancing Africa's water security through collaboration
A young girl carries yellow water jerry cans, a symbol of the hours spent searching for water in the Marsabit, Kenya on August 2, 2022. Prof. Sipho Seepe The University of Zululand and Chang'an University had the privilege of hosting the 2025 International Conference on Water Security and Sustainable Development. The three-day prestigious conference (23rd to 25th May 2025) brought together leading scientists, policymakers, industry experts, and stakeholders from around the world to address one of the most pressing challenges of water security. According to the United Nations, over two billion people live in water-stressed countries. The effects of climate change have led to a reduction in freshwater availability and climate-induced variability, resulting in an increase in drought in some regions and floods in diverse participant base underscores a global commitment to advancing scientific understanding to formulate practical solutions. This much was evident from an array of topics that were covered. These ranged from presentations on geothermal systems, climate change impacts, groundwater quality, depletion, and sustainability to antibiotic resistance in mining-affected waters. The conference also touched on agricultural water management and general water resource this end, the conference provided 'a vital platform for sharing cutting-edge research, innovative solutions, and collaborative strategies to enhance water security, improve governance, and promote adaptive management to promote sustainable development.' With expertise from a myriad of backgrounds from every continent, the conference lived up to its sub-theme of 'Collaboration Makes the World Better.' The benefits of such collaboration are multifaceted. First, environmental challenges such as water scarcity, droughts, and floods, which cut across narrow disciplines, can be resolved by instituting multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. Collaboration enables the sharing of data, technologies, and best practices. This is particularly true if one considers that many local solutions have global applicability. Scientific collaboration facilitates knowledge transfer. Fragmented efforts have proven to be costly and inefficient. Through collaboration, nations are thus able to pool together resources in the form of expertise and technology. Closer to home, the paper "Ensuring the Sustainability of Groundwater Resources in Africa" by Professor Godfred Darko from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana underscores the importance of scientific collaboration in addressing practical, existential challenges. Africa, the second-largest continent (30.4 million km²) and second-most populous (1.55 billion in 2025), with a young population, is known for its abundant natural resources. While more focus has been on its surface water systems, less is known that it is also richly endowed with vast groundwater resources. As a result, Africa is generally presented as a water-scarce surface water of 1,170 km³ with over 1,270 dams storing ~20% of available water compares poorly with its groundwater capacity of over 660,000 km³. This translates to more than twenty times the water in lakes. Groundwater provides massive opportunities for sustainable development. African countries use less than 10 per cent of renewable groundwater. Water security challenges to be managed include pollution from agriculture, industry, domestic sources, weak transboundary management, and governance structures. These challenges can be addressed through the integration of structures such as the African Union and the African Ministers Council on Water. Groundwater is critical for drinking, irrigation, and ecosystems. Its sustainability would require governing structures to ensure enhanced monitoring, pollution management, and research into sustainable practices. The Xi'an conference was a prelude to the 3rd International Conference on Earth and Environmental Sciences (ICCES-2025) earmarked for the 17th to 20th August 2025 in Durban. The Durban meeting has already attracted over 600 participants comprising scientists, industry experts, and policymakers. Represented will be more than 70 countries from Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. UNIZULU's hosting of international conferences is part of a broader strategy of transforming itself as an authentic African university, as opposed to a university in Africa. To this end, it has decidedly branded itself as A Node of African Thought. In partnering with the best players in the world, UNIZULU rejects the colonial and apartheid hierarchisation of higher education that continues to bedevil most of the country's public discourse. Such a posture enables the university to chart its path of development. Instead of mimicking and following others, it has chosen to be a pathfinder. To this end, UNIZULU has made enormous progress in inculcating university-wide consciousness of African Thought. When it comes to development, one cannot be a visitor to China without marvelling at the remarkable strides it has made in terms of its investment in socio-economic development. In forty years, China has reportedly achieved a miraculous feat of lifting about 800 million people out of absolute poverty. Its investment in both science and technology has propelled it to become the second-largest economy. China has redefined the scale and speed of technological limits. In doing so, it has rewritten the global engineering playbook. 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IOL News
20-06-2025
- IOL News
Gang violence kill scores in womens' prison, the Black Hole of Calcutta, and US buys Alaska, the headline acts of yesteryear
Freed Nelson Mandela acknowledges the applause on his first visit to the United Nations in New York in 1990. Mandela urged the U.N . to maintain sanctions against South Africa until apartheid is abolished. On this day in history, June 20 1248 The University of Oxford, the second oldest university in the western world after the University of Bologna, receives its royal charter. They are predated by institutions from the Islamic Golden Age – the University of Al Quaraouiyine, in Fez, Morocco (circa 857–859), and Cairo's Al-Azhar University, founded in 970 or 972. 1631 The Irish village of Baltimore is sacked by pirates from Algeria. 1756 A British garrison is imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta after the Siraj ud-Daulah Nawab of Bengal takes Calcutta from the British. Most of the soldiers die. 1867 US buys Alaska from Russia for $7.2m. 1877 Alexander Graham Bell installs world's first commercial telephone service. 1895 The Kiel Canal, crossing the base of the Jutland peninsula and the busiest artificial waterway in the world, is opened. 1921 At the Imperial Conference in London, Srinivasa Sastri argues for full citizenship rights to Indians in South Africa and other colonies. 1940 Italy tries invading France and fails. 1944 A German V-2 rocket soars 176 km – it's the first man-made object in outer space. 1963 The Soviet Union and US agree to set up the 'red telephone' link between them. 1987 New Zealand beat France 29-9 in final of first Rugby World Cup, in Auckland. 1990 Nelson Mandela and wife, Winnie, are given a ticker-tape parade in New York city as they begin an eight-city fund-raising tour. 1991 The German Bundestag votes to move the seat of government from Bonn to Berlin. 2018 Algeria turns off its internet to stop students cheating during exams. 2020 Highest temperature recorded in the Arctic circle, 38C in Verkhoyansk, Siberia. 2020 A dust cloud from the Sahara desert in North Africa reaches the Caribbean, largest for half a century. 2023 At least 41 women are killed in violence by rival gangs at a prison in Tamara, Honduras. 2023 The site of Julius Caesar's assassination in Rome, the Largo Argentina square, dating back to third century BC, opens to the public for the first time. 2024 The oldest shipwreck ever (3 300 years old) is found in the Mediterranean. DAILY NEWS
Daily Maverick
17-06-2025
- Daily Maverick
From anti-apartheid to Antarctic rights — the radical legal vision of Cormac Cullinan
The South African lawyer believes the melting continent should be recognised as a legal person. The growing momentum behind the idea — and a major polar award — suggests the world may be ready to listen. When Cormac Cullinan strolled into the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London earlier this month, he thought he was there to answer a few questions for a panel of judges. Cullinan, a Cape Town-based lawyer and a figurehead of the international Antarctic Rights initiative, had been shortlisted for the 2025 Shackleton Medal for the Protection of the Polar Regions. He insists he had no reason to expect he would win the £10,000 prize and a hand-struck silver medal. Fellow nominees included polar luminaries — scientists, conservationists and contemporary explorers. Sir Ernest Shackleton's granddaughter, Alexandra, was a judge. 'I was surprised to be shortlisted,' says Cullinan, the environmental lawyer who helped suspend Shell's seismic surveys off South Africa's Wild Coast. Cullinan had let the organisers know he would be passing through London in early June, in case they wanted to meet him. The RGS's official line was that the final decision was yet to be made. When they asked him to meet the executive, he assumed it was just part of the shortlisting process. 'It was a really amazing building,' he says. 'On one corner is a statue of Shackleton, on the other David Livingstone. These great explorers had been members.' He sat at the end of a table, surrounded by the RGS top brass and a publicity team. 'I thought they were filming it because not all the judges were there.' What happened next blindsided the South African. 'I didn't think my beard was rugged enough' 'They said, 'Before you go, there's just one more thing.' They put a laptop in front of me,' Cullinan recalls. 'It was the Shackleton award video. When it came to the end, it said, 'And the 2025 winner is… ' And this picture of me came up.' The organisers had choreographed the moment to the last detail, complete with a photo shoot and Shackleton expedition-style jersey on hand — modelled after the one worn by the Irish explorer in a famous photograph. 'At least it made me look more … Shackletonian,' Cullinan smiles. 'Even if I didn't think my beard was rugged enough.' Cullinan, the legal pioneer behind the concept of earth jurisprudence, says the award is a collective recognition for the Antarctic Rights initiative. They had just met in Devon, followed by academic discussions in Oxford. 'It was extraordinary synchronicity,' Cullinan says. Cullinan hopes the recognition from the Shackleton Medal will open doors. 'This thing will give us huge leverage,' he says. An inclusive voice for the imperilled region At the core of the initiative is the radical idea that the frozen – but melting — Antarctic continent and surrounding ocean should be recognised as a legal person with its own voice in global governance. The initiative's draft declaration supports human involvement in the region, such as science and activities like controlled tourism and fishing. Even so, Cullinan argues that Antarctica's representative voice 'would be a pure kind of voice for nature and Antarctica'. This probably means refining the Antarctic Treaty System in its present form, he argues, which he describes as secretive and often gridlocked by geopolitics. 'I had to unlearn what my culture had taught me' Cullinan's path to the Shackleton Medal began on Durban's segregated beaches during the final decade of apartheid. 'I cut my teeth as an anti-apartheid activist,' Cullinan says. A 1980 student exchange to New Zealand exposed him to an unflinching external view of his home country. As a founding chair of the Durban Democratic Association, an affiliate of the non-racial United Democratic Front (UDF), Cullinan remembers organising 'street marches to go on to segregated beaches and many different things … 'I had been born into the oppressor class. When the scales fell from my eyes, I had to unlearn a lot of what I had absorbed unconsciously from apartheid society. I ended up leaving the country to avoid conscription, because I wasn't going to fight for that army.' Thomas Berry, the American eco-theologian, gave Cullinan the concept to move from political activism into jurisprudence. That idea of unlearning dominance would become the philosophical heart of what Cullinan later called earth jurisprudence: a radical reimagining of the law and seeing it as intrinsic to the ecological order. 'Berry taught me that the philosophy of law only deals with humans and corporations. But legal philosophy needs to deal with all our relationships — including with beings other than humans,' Cullinan says. A global movement for Antarctica — 'modelled' on the UDF This led to his 2002 book Wild Law, which set out the founding principles of earth jurisprudence. From this grew a movement. In 2010, Cullinan was asked by Bolivian campaigners to lead the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Bolivia's legislative assembly passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth that year — around the same time the lawyer helped co-found the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. 'To my mind it was modelled quite closely on the UDF in South Africa,' Cullinan says. 'An alliance of organisations of many kinds, united around a few core principles.' That idea — with nature as a legal subject and ecocide as the crime — neared a possible new frontier when Cullinan was approached by German MEP Carola Rackete in 2021. Rackete asked him: Could rights of nature be applied to Antarctica itself? 'I thought, 'Well, if Antarctica is going to have rights, it has to be a person in the eyes of the law,'' he remarks. 'I realised you're talking for the first time about an ecological entity being a person under international law.' 'Open' for input Cullinan and a working group of academics, lawyers and legal campaigners have set out to draft the Antarctica Rights Declaration, now open for feedback. It proposes rights for the region which would, in theory, enable the Antarctic to hold states or corporations accountable for actions that violate those rights. To represent Antarctica's interests in an international court, Cullinan suggests a kind of parliament may emerge — a representative body that appoints delegates to climate summits and biodiversity talks. Representation, he boldly adds, may even include participation in Antarctic Treaty consultative meetings, the annual governance gathering which this year opens in Milan on June 23. 'What's good for Antarctica,' presses the Shackleton Medal recipient, 'is good for humanity.' DM
