Literally.
"$42m offered for ideas for better toilets" July 20, 2011|Associated Press
NAIROBI - With their bare hands, they use buckets to draw the feces from the pit latrines in Korogocho, fill the oil drums, and push them to a river to deposit the waste. Every trip leaves the men with splotches of sewage on their faces and hands....
Joseph Irungu’s enterprising spirit was echoed across the continent yesterday, when the world’s largest charitable foundation announced its newest venture: an effort to reinvent the toilet to bring safe, clean sanitation to millions of poor people in the developing world.
At the AfricaSan Conference in Kigali, Rwanda, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $42 million in grants to encourage innovation in the capture, storage, and repurposing of waste as an energy resource....
Let's all meet at the shit pit.
--more--"
"Kenyan president torches 5 tons of illegal ivory to focus attention on poaching" by Associated Press / July 21, 2011
MANYANI, Kenya - Kenya’s president set fire to more than 5 tons of elephant ivory worth $16 million yesterday, in an act meant to focus attention on a rising tide of poaching deaths....
Kenyan officials first set fire to a mound of ivory in 1989, a desperate call-to-action to wake the world to a poaching crisis that sent Africa’s elephant populations plummeting. Elephant numbers are much healthier today, but elephant advocates say a second crisis is coming, as China’s middle class seeks to satisfy its ivory appetite.
Notice everything is always the China's fault?
The group Save The Elephants cited newspaper headlines from last week that documented elephant-related arrests in Kenya, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
A global ban on the ivory trade in 1989 briefly halted the decline in elephant numbers. But that initial success has been undermined by Asia’s booming demand - and increasing human-elephant conflicts as people encroach on elephant habitat....
--more--"
"UK court allows Kenya torture lawsuit" by July 22, 2011|By Associated Press
LONDON - Four elderly Kenyans who said they were tortured during an anticolonial rebellion in the 1950s can sue the British government, a judge ruled yesterday.
The Kenyans say they were beaten and sexually assaulted by officers acting for the British administration who were trying to suppress the “Mau Mau’’ rebellion, in which groups of Kenyans attacked British officials and white farmers who had settled in some of Kenya’s most fertile lands.
They say British administrators were aware they were being mistreated and want an apology and compensation.
The British government tried to have the case dismissed, saying it could not be held legally responsible for the long-ago abuses. It argues that all the powers and liabilities of the colonial administration passed to the Kenyan government on independence in 1963....
In 1952, Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared a state of emergency in the country and sent British soldiers to help colonial administrators capture the fighters and send them to detention camps. African soldiers under the King’s African Rifles regiment also took part in the assault on the Mau Mau and their supporters.
President Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was one of thousands of Kenyans detained.
The four Kenyan claimants, now in their 70s and 80s, say they were abused by European and African soldiers, officers, and prison guards in the detention camps. Two male claimants - Ndiku Mutua and Paolo Nzili - say they were castrated, and Jane Muthoni Mara says she was violently sexually assaulted.
High Court Judge Richard McCombe said he had “not found that there was systematic torture nor, if there was, the UK government is liable’’ - but ruled that the case should go to court.
--more--"
So western governments have been torturing a long time now as they throw human rights in everyone's face?
