Patrick Bond

This week’s World Toilet Summit offers an opportunity to contemplate how we curate our crap. Increasingly the calculus seems to be cash, generating contradictions ranging from local to global scales, across race, gender, generation and geography.

The heads of state of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) network of governments are coming to Durban, South Africa, in four months, meeting on March 26-27 at the International Convention Centre (ICC), Africa’s largest venue.

What did Hurricane Sandy teach us a week ago, here in South Africa, just as $30 billion of state funds are being committed to dig out the vast new Durban port capacity over the next three decades, plus billions more nearby for petro-chemical industry expansion in Africa’s largest oil-refining com

The latest news from the labour front is that 12,000 workers were fired on 12 October by Angloplats for a wildcat strike (it is likely most will be rehired in coming days if an above-inflation wage settlement is reached), and thousands of others are threatened by the mining houses.

‘At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This week, Durban’s International Convention Centre (ICC) hosts 1300 delegates to a Shopping Centre Congress sponsored by one of South Africa’s most environmentally-destructive financial institutions.

The recent surge of unconnected community protests across South Africa confirms the country’s profound social, economic and environmental contradictions.

Near the Dulles International Airport west of Washington last weekend, I found myself a couple of dozen meters away from a formidable gathering of 150 powerbrokers – the Bilderberg Group – whose capacity to move money and influence events rivals even the upcoming G20 meeting in Mexico, last month

The debate over the Green Economy rages on next month in Rio de Janeiro, at the International Society for Ecological Economics meetings, the Cupula dos Povos alternative people’s summit, and the UN’s Rio+20 Earth Summit.

The situation for the many constituencies hopeful about Jim Yong Kim’s ‘election’ as World Bank president is comparable to early 2009.