HARARE, 2 August 2007 (IRIN) - The lifestyle normally associated with an urban society is fast disappearing from Zimbabwe's once bustling capital, Harare.

The city's 2.8 million residents are adopting a way of life more akin to the country's rural areas, where drinking water is drawn from shallow pits and electricity is all but unavailable, although the metropolitan area's population density has produced its own quirks, such as untreated sewage spilling onto the streets.

The prospect of a John Howard video turning up on Youtube at 5am is about as enticing as the news of a new Osama bin Laden video turning up on Al Jazeera's doorstep. Just as chilling a prospect and, for that matter, just as irrelevant in the final washup.

DAKAR, 27 July 2007 (IRIN) - Food imports are keeping Sierra Leone from realising agricultural self-sufficiency and meeting the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating hunger by 2015, experts say. In a country where 80 percent of food is imported, mostly from the USA and Europe, the local agricultural industry is feeble and local farmers struggle to compete.

The report http://www.i

Remember when Condi Rice was being touted as the most powerful woman in the world? (Take a bow, Pratibha Patil.) Recently, the S-o-S wrote an op-ed touting the success of public-private partnerships in the reconstruction of Lebanon. No newspaper would publish it. Anywhere.

The San Francisco Chronicle takes

It's three weeks since Uncle Joe Ratzinger issued a fatwa announcing that there was only one church (the one he runs).

This week, however, brings the news of the reconciliation of two extra-Benedict(XVI)ine denominations, with the declaration of unity issued in Cairo by the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The announcement by World Council of Churches General Secretary Samuel Kobia can be found here.

Grist, that marvellous online environmental news magazine, has released its list of the world's fifteen greenest cities.

Reykjavik at number one is interesting, as is Curitiba at three even if only because I hadn't previously heard of it (likewise Bahía de Caráquez at nine). But Sydney at 10? The reasons they give are unconvincing, though to be fair Sydney is not that bad in the post-Olympic era.

It may be a tad simplistic to describe the conflict in Darfur as "the world's first climate-change war", but the following press release from Boston University on July 11 gives hope of a science-driven resolution to probably the world's worst humanitarian crisis of the present day:

'1,000 Wells for Darfur' initiative launched

His deputy may have invented the internet, global warming and worldwide simultaneous benefit rock concerts, but Monica's Main Man has finally joined the bloggerati.

ZIMBABWE: Daughters fetch high prices as brides

HARARE, 17 July 2007 (IRIN) - Daughters have become a high-priced commodity in Zimbabwe, where a dowry has become a means of escaping poverty in a rapidly declining economy. "When people are mired in such hunger as we have been seeing in this country for over seven years, they will do anything to survive," Innocent Makwiramiti, a Harare-based economist, told IRIN.