Here’s some great news for the swimmers amongst you. The City of Cape Town is about to launch a first-of-its-kind initiative to clean up the water running into three popular bathing areas. The project aims to improve the quality of storm water at two outlet sites in Three Anchor Bay and another at Rocklands, between Sea Point and Mouille Point.
Green, a female orangutan, is the subject of a powerful new documentary. She was rescued after deforestation in Indonesia left her without a home – and paralysed down her left side. Green’s last couple of hours on earth was filmed and included in a documentary by Patrick Rouxel for Al Jazeera. His aim is to highlight the extent to which deforestation is “raping our planet.”
By now, most of you would be aware of what wingsuit flying is, thanks to Jeb Corliss. But, quietly over the years, others have joined in on the rather crazy hobby too. Take Roberta Mancino, for instance. She’s an Italian model and has skydived naked a few times. Then she met Jeb. She absolutely kills it in this video.
Zimbabweans will be reminded of the previous times the country has declared a state of disaster as food shortages threatened widespread starvation. A third of Zimbabwe’s current maize crop has just been written off due to a prolonged dry spell, according to reports.
Before you begin to make fun of the headline used for this article, we must tell you that the vermin extractors will also be serving an educational purpose. Johannesburg’s general owl population has been in decline for years as a result of urbanisation, but new owl projects are helping to combat this.
Yesterday fury broke out across social networks over surfaced photos of Donald Trump’s sons on a safari killing spree in Zimbabwe. Taken last year, the pictures show Eric and Donald Trump proudly posing next to animals they’ve killed. The list include an elephant, leopard, crocodile, kudu, civet cat and water buck. Full gallery of the boys’ hunting achievements – after the jump.
He’s eaten from a zebra carcass, swum across freezing lakes in just his undies to see what it’d be like, and he once slept in a dead sheep’s carcass for warmth. Sadly, it might be a while before we get to watch any of Bear’s antics again. The Discovery Channel set him free for good yesterday by announcing their relationship is over.
Hectique. This is not the way you want to end your school skiing trip. A bus full of kids, travelling through a Swiss tunnel, hit a kerb and crashed face first into a wall inside the tunnel. A full gallery of the disaster is inside.
While the rest of Cape Town took part in yesterday’s Argus, a group of hipsters understandably felt that this event was way too commercial. So 100 of them shed their clothes instead, and cycled naked around the Prestwich Memorial. They raising awareness of the fact that the city has one of the highest carbon emissions per capita ratings in the world. Pictures taken of all the…action…after the jump.
Last week, director James Cameron found the one spot where people wouldn’t ask him about the Avatar sequel – 8km beneath the ocean, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, in a specially designed submarine. He’ll be repeating the trick later this month at the ocean’s deepest point to shoot footage for a couple of documentaries.
The debate around re-opening the international rhino horn trade is still raging. While government has not given any indication yet of whether it will support the proposal to lift the ban, the demand for rhino horn from Chinese medicine practitioners is not going away.
A rather large Great White Shark, measuring 4,3 metres in length, was caught 400 metres behind the breakers of Fish Hoek beach yesterday. Local fishermen from Kalk Bay accidentally caught the large female in fishing nets they had set late on Saturday night.
Humans and animals don’t always get along. But on occasion one species helps the other out in a remarkable way. When it comes to dolphins, it’s often the animal coming to the rescue of the human, but in this dramatic video, it is beachgoers in Brazil who lend a hand to the dolphins. Heartwarming stuff.
Our local wildlife can be very… independent minded. A giraffe and a baboon have made separate headlines today for their remarkably free-thinking behaviour.
You may have heard about the massive storm that hit KZN over the weekend, disrupting pretty much everything. Over 250mm of rain fell on the KZN coast this weekend – causing the Palmiet River to overflow its banks. Residents of Quarry Heights also faced evacuations. Guess what? She’s coming back.
It would appear that authorities are finally starting to make serious inroads into the rhino horn trafficking underworld. A suspected kingpin, and former Mpumalanga police officer, was arrested on Friday in Hazyview. He was found with four rhino horns, and over R60 000 in his possession.
At least six people have reportedly died as a result of tropical storm Irina, which struck the KwaZulu-Natal coast over the weekend. Rescue teams, emergency workers, and the police worked continuously yesterday to help KwaZulu-Natal residents through the worst of the storm. Durban surfers, however, enjoyed themselves.
Port Elizabeth’s windswept landscape already features one wind farm, and the building of a second farm on the other side of the city is currently under debate. Hearings are underway today in PE, to test opinion on the development of a new wind farm at Blue Horizon Bay. Many residents are opposed to this – basically, because wind farms are ugly.
The Hout Bay Residents’ Association will apply for a court interdict to stop construction on the Chapman’s Peak toll plaza in Cape Town, it has been confirmed. Construction has begun at the site, and lawyers representing the movement have been drawing up the interdict to halt the R54 million project.
Environmental planning authorities in sleepy Fish Hoek on the False Bay coast are reconsidering the installation of an exclusion net across the bay adjacent to the town, to try stave off the regular loitering of Great White sharks near the popular beach front.
These pictures were taken in February at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya. An elephant was giving birth when a group of lions and hyenas mistook her newborn for a potential breakfast. But watch as the rest of the herd comes to the female’s aid by huddling around her until she delivers her calf.
Right on the back of the news that four SANParks employees have been arrested in relation to rhino posting, comes the news that three veterinarians have appeared in court for the wrongful possession of drugs used in rhino poaching. Does this mean that something is finally being done about the poaching crisis in the country?
It’s difficult to act surprised at the announcement from SANParks this morning, stating that four Kruger National Park wildlife officials were arrested yesterday in connection with rhino poaching activities. There are such large amounts of money involved with the rhino poaching syndicates, and just too many closely related coincidences, for there not to have been someone involved on the inside.
Capetonian Dave Meinert was recently asked to look after a mate’s dog for the weekend. Apparently that included strapping a camera to the pet’s back and making a music video for local electro-hero Johnny Neon. And boy, are we glad he did that! See the video that has had everyone talking for the last week – after the jump.
Capetonians: on Janssens Road, in Tableview, near the bike shop, this traffic light is sporting a new “green” signal. Apparently, this isn’t the first traffic light that’s been sporting this kind of “green” signal either.
[Thanks, Jake R]
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA as they are better known, is a crazy bunch. They’re a bunch of militant vegetarians, and at one point even went so far as to rename tuna to “sea kittens”, in an attempt to make the canned fish seem more cuddly and cute. This is a little embarrassing.
Contract archaeologist, Katie Smuts, said on Friday that she estimated the foundations were constructed between 1830 and 1850, and that archaeologists were trying to determine their significance. Smuts jokingly compared that the styles revealed on the porcelain artefacts they found helped determine their age because it was similar to comparing the styles that hipsters wore on their clothes in the year 2012.
Google Street View is pretty great! It lets me see rural villages, the National Gallery in London, post-crisis Fukushima, and your house. And soon, in collaboration with the Catlin Seaview Survey, it’ll be letting people explore Great Barrier Reef as part of the expanding ‘Seaview’ project.
Do you remember when Jeb Corliss was jumping off Table Mountain in his wingsuit in January, and one of his jumps didn’t go as well as he’d planned? Well, he’s just released the footage showing the accident from his point of view, filmed from his GoPro cameras, as well as various angles from the other cameramen that were filming at the time.
The human race is going to have to start believing in science – and quickly – if we want a hope in hell of surviving the environmental crisis we’re facing. This was the sentiment at a recent gathering of the world’s pre-eminent scientific minds in Vancouver. At the meeting, thousands of scientists discussed the problem that their industry is “under seige”, and that the world needs help to believe in science again.