I'm just giving you what I find at the bottom of the pan:
Gold mines leave tarnished legacy
When it rains in the shantytown of Tudor Shaft, the streets pool with orange water that smells like vinegar. Scientists say the water contains radioactive minerals and has killed all aquatic life in a nearby river.
Tudor Shaft takes its name, and its troubles, from an abandoned gold mine.
It’s just a fraction of the toxic but long-overlooked legacy of South Africa’s most famous industry. Mining accounts for 17 percent of everything South Africa produces, and the country is the world’s fourth biggest exporter, sitting on a mother lode that runs for miles from Johannesburg into the countryside.
Keep that in mind for later.
Social campaigners, preoccupied first with overthrowing apartheid and then with raising living standards for a badly neglected black majority, are now waking up to the environmental cause. The effects of mining are the focus of parliamentary debate and newspaper stories. But no one is yet taking responsibility or funding a cleanup that would probably put a dent in profits.
Johannesburg literally sits on a gold mine. Flat-topped heaps of mined earth are backdrops to skyscrapers and bridges. FNB Stadium, the main arena in last year’s World Cup soccer tournament, sits at the foot of a mine dump. Johannesburg’s amusement park is called Gold Reef City and features a ride that plunges into a mine shaft.
The city of 3.2 million grew out of the gold bonanza discovered in the early 1900s. Nowadays, whenever a mining company removes one of the 270 dumps around Johannesburg to reprocess the waste, heritage advocates complain that the city is losing a piece of its patrimony.
The worst environmental effects are felt in places like Tudor Shaft, 25 miles from the city. Here, Patrick Mkoyo’s children run barefoot, their feet tinted orange from contaminated sand. He says they sometimes come home with rashes or breathing difficulties.
“They are not OK here, but I don’t have a choice; I have no other place to stay,’’ says Mkoyo, 35, as he stirs a family lunch of cornmeal porridge. The doctors tell him they don’t know what is causing the medical problems.
But Chris Busby, a professor from Northern Ireland’s University of Ulster, thinks he knows.
In December, he tested the soil around Mkoyo’s shack and found it contained at least 32 times the amount of radioactivity allowed by government regulators. Busby prepared the report for the Federation for Sustainable Environment, a private Johannesburg group trying to bring attention to the issue.
I must be a naive soul because I once thought that was what newspapers were for.
Oh, what a long strange trip it's been.
Terence McCarthy, a minerals professor at Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand, radioactivity comes from uranium traces in mined rock, which lies in dumps until rain flushes it into the ground and river systems.
You know, same as the radiation continuing to spew from Japan.
Aside from Tudor Shaft, other parts of the city’s outskirts are feeling the damage of toxic mine water, entering rivers and communities at an increasing rate with heavy rain in recent months, scientists say.
Some stories are such fleeting one-day wonders, aren't they?
And with all that gold around forgive me for asking WTF:
S. Africa to spend more to help poor
South Africa will spend more to help the poor, while offering tax relief and other probusiness steps in a country where nearly a quarter of the population is unemployed, the finance minister said yesterday.
All governments stink.
The economy grew 4.4 percent in the fourth quarter, and unemployment shrunk slightly from 25.3 percent to 24 percent. Some of the nation’s economic gains were credited to its hosting of the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament, but experts have said they fear the advances may not stick.
But using one might work?
Protest against S. African police gets violent
Angry demonstrators set fire to two government buildings yesterday in a central South African town where police beat a protester in an assault that aired on state TV and sparked accusations that police were resorting to apartheid-era brutality. The man beaten Wednesday in Ficksburg was later found dead with bullet wounds.
Wow, their cops are just like ours -- in more ways than one:
Scandals roil South Africa police force
One of South Africa’s highest-ranking police officers faced charges yesterday of plotting with other officers to murder a rival in a love triangle, and then covering up the crime for more than a decade.
The case of Richard Mdluli, who denies the charges, is just one in series of scandals involving the police in South Africa where high rates of murder, rape, and other crimes are national crises.
See what happens when you let the black man rule himself? Does that not seem to be the implication and inflection from the elite Zionist supremacist paper?
Yeah, those darkies were much better with a white overseer (remember, Israel was one of apartheid South Africa's few friends -- even tried to sell 'em nuclear weapons that they stole from us).
Questions about possible criminals within the force are now further undermining morale in the ranks and confidence among the public.
Same in AmeriKa with the killings and taserings, etc.
Last year, former national police chief Jackie Selebi was convicted of taking money and gifts from a confessed drug smuggler and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Related: South Africa's Chief of Corruption
And this year, a government watchdog found that Selebi’s successor, Bheki Cele, acted unlawfully in making a deal to lease police offices from a prominent businessman.
Whatever happened to truth and reconciliation, huh?
$1.25m will fund access to Mandela papers
Citing rumors that information from the CIA led to Mandela’s 1962 arrest, Dangor said the foundation seeks any documents that might substantiate that and is looking for any other archival information that could shed light on other issues, no matter how sensitive.
Still trying to cover it up 49 years later.
The AmeriKan media has no shame.
Related: Israelis Operate in South Africa
Yeah, that abominable operation (literally) doesn't get much press either.
