Upington, South Africa
World’s biggest solar plant: South Africa has announced plans to build an enormous solar power plant that would produce enough electricity to meet 10 percent of the country’s energy needs. Giant mirrors and solar panels would blanket an area of 35 square miles in the country’s sunny Northern Cape region. “It hardly ever rains, it hardly has clouds,” said project manager Jonathan de Vries. “It’s even better than the Sahara desert because it doesn’t have sandstorms.” Most of South Africa’s energy currently comes from coal, though one in six residents lacks electricity altogether. The solar project would be funded by a consortium of domestic and international investors.
Cairo
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Anti-Facebook campaign: Alarmed by opposition groups using Facebook to network, the Egyptian government has launched a propaganda campaign warning people away from the site. One opposition group, the April 6 Movement, has used Facebook to organize strikes and pro-democracy rallies. Another group, of more than 100,000, uses Facebook to lobby Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed ElBaradei to run for president. On state-run TV, Mona ElSharkawy, the host of the country’s biggest talk show, has called for a ban on the social-networking site. She warned viewers against its “evil,” saying it can be used by foreign intelligence agencies to gather information about Egypt. Within days, an Egyptian Facebook group called “Stop the Ban of Facebook in Egypt” had formed, attracting thousands of members.
Baghdad
Tariq Aziz to hang: The public face of Saddam Hussein’s government, former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, was sentenced to death by hanging this week. Fluent in English, the whiskey-loving, cigar-smoking Aziz, a member of Iraq’s Christian minority, presented a Westernized image of Iraq on the world stage. He gave numerous interviews to the international press during the 1990s, defending the regime’s invasion of Kuwait and its refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. The 74-year-old was sentenced for abetting the imprisonment, torture, execution, and forced exile of tens of thousands of Shiites during the 1970s and ’80s.
Kabul
Bags of cash: President Hamid Karzai confirmed this week that he regularly receives “bags of money” amounting to some $2 million a year from the Iranian government—for “special expenses and helping people.” Karzai said the payments were a normal part of running his government and were not secret. He added that the U.S. also provides cash to some of his envoys, a claim the U.S. denied. “We’re not in the big bags of cash business,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Afghanistan is tied for second with Myanmar on Transparency International’s list of most corrupt countries; Somalia is first.
Siming, China
Forced abortion at 8 months: Chinese family planning officials dragged a pregnant woman from her home two weeks ago and injected her with a drug that killed her 8-month-old fetus. Construction worker Luo Yanquan said officials cited China’s one-child policy, saying his wife, Xiao Aiying, was not allowed to give birth because the couple already had a 9-year-old girl. Late-term abortions are legal in China. While forced abortions are not, they are believed to be common though seldom reported. Xiao’s ordeal became public after Luo set up a blog to tell the world about it, complete with pictures of his wife in the hospital. Local officials disputed Luo’s account, saying the abortion was consensual.
Mount Merapi, Indonesia
Quake, tsunami, volcano: Indonesia was rocked this week by a magnitude 7.7 earthquake that triggered a 10-foot tsunami. At least 275 people were killed on the archipelago’s more remote islands and hundreds more were missing; 10 villages were swept away. The quake traveled the same fault that caused the massive Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries in 2004. A day after the earthquake, Indonesia’s most active volcano erupted, blanketing central Java in thousands of tons of toxic gas and molten lava. At least 30 people were killed, including the elderly spiritual guardian of the volcano, and 20,000 fled their homes.
Wellington, New Zealand
Revolt in Middle-earth: Kiwis rejoiced this week after Prime Minister John Key announced the resolution of a dispute that had threatened to send production of the film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit to another country. The compromise on local actors’ wages and working conditions came after thousands of New Zealanders—some dressed as hobbits and carrying banners that read “We Love Hobbits” and “New Zealand Is Middle-earth”—marched in Wellington to protest any effort by Warner Bros. and director Peter Jackson to film elsewhere. The three blockbuster films based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, all shot in New Zealand, injected more than $250 million into the tiny nation’s economy.
