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
a day ago
- 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
4 days ago
- 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
IOL News
09-06-2025
- IOL News
Study reveals cutting off rhino horns significantly reduces poaching
Donors from Friends of African Wildlife during a rhino conservation experience. Image: Southern African Wildlife College The best and cheapest way to protect rhinos, whose population has plummeted over the last 15 years because of poaching, is to cut off their horns, according to researchers who carried out a seven-year study in southern Africa. The analysis of poaching before and after the de-horning of almost 2,300 rhinos showed that removing the keratin-based protrusions cut the crime by 78%. The researchers are from three South African universities - Nelson Mandela, Stellenbosch and Cape Town - and the UK's University of Oxford. Over that period, poachers killed almost 2,000 rhinos in the area under study. It covered 10 reserves in South Africa's Greater Kruger region - a network of public and private conservation land that encompasses an area bigger than Israel - between 2017 and 2023, as well as an adjacent sanctuary in Mozambique. Together, the region hosts the world's biggest concentration of rhinos. 'De-horning rhinos is associated with large and abrupt reductions in poaching,' the researchers said in the study published in the Science journal on Thursday. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ In the first quarter of 2025, 103 rhinos were poached across South Africa, 65 of those within national parks. Although the country recorded a 16% overall decline in poaching last year, increases in key areas such as Kruger National Park underscore the need for continued vigilance and interventions such as dehorning. Image: Southern African Wildlife College Poachers have had rhinos in South Africa, where almost all of the world's population of the endangered animals live, under siege for more than a decade. They shoot the animals with assault rifles, often by the light of the full moon, and then hack off their horns. Those are ground down into powder and used in potions erroneously believed to cure cancer and boost virility, primarily in East Asia. The practice of de-horning also accounted for just 1.2% of the $74 million spent by the reserves on anti-poaching programs in the four years to 2021, the researchers said. That money went toward a range of measures including 500 rangers deployed across the reserves at any one time as well as cameras and tracking dogs. Still, even though de-horning cut the annual chance of an individual rhino being poached to 0.6% by the end of the study period from 13% at the start, there were instances of criminals killing rhinos to harvest the stumps that had been left after the horn removal, they said. That means that conservationists can't abandon other anti-poaching measures entirely, they said. Poachers could also start targeting other areas containing rhinos that still have horns. The number of rhinos - both of the white and less common black variety - killed illegally in South Africa last year fell to 420 from a peak of 1,215 a decade earlier. That improvement was partially due to de-horning exercises, according to Dion George, the nation's environment minister.
