collected snippets of immediate importance...


Thursday, June 12, 2008

can soccer stop the violence?
"In November last year, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated 4.2 million South Africans were living on $1 a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid. Globalization was supposed to be the tide to lift all boats, but the evidence in South Africa suggests that millions of boats are not merely missing the tide, they're in an entirely different ocean."
(...) "Construction--and corruption--is booming. But almost none of the building or the money can be accessed by the poor who live in shantytowns without proper water, sanitation or electricity." Housing prices in the twenty-first century have gone up 92 percent, while wages have risen a mere 8 percent. As slums are cleared, tensions will surely rise.

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