LAST Autumn Johannesburg was very much to the fore because a racehorse of that name crowned a record-breaking year for Aiden O Brien by winning the Breeders Cup at Belmont Park, New York. On their own home ground, Johannesburg took on the best two-year-old colts America could muster and annihilated them with a magnificent victory.
This Autumn the name Johannesburg is on every-body s lips for a totally different reason.
In that city in South Africa was assembled the great-est array of world leaders ever. Around 100 top notch-ers from the world we live on had five minutes to have their say, to discuss the mega-trends of the age: population growth, urbanization and the pressures on the environment and the climate that results from them.
Not surprisingly, this vast and disparate cast of characters is hard pressed to agree on so vast and disparate an agenda. Like globalisation itself, the conference is so big that nobody is steering it.
Now here are extracts from some of the speeches made at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg:
"Johannesburg must initiate the decade of action on sustainable development It matters for the many, many millions who are poor and starving. It matters for our children and for future generations. Let us not fail in this historic task." An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern
A path to prosperity that ravages the environment and leaves a majority of humankind behind in squalor will soon prove to be a dead-end road for everyone". Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General
"Our house is burning down and we re blind to it. Nature, mutilated and over-exploited, can no longer regenerate and we refuse to admit it let us make sure that the 21st century does not become the century of humanity s crime against life itself." President Chirac of France
"Of course summits can never deliver everything. But because they don t deliver everything, let s not try and pretend they deliver nothing. We re making progress." Tony Blair
"The draft plan is not going to be a strong document if you are negotiating with the world, you can t get everybody to accept a strong agreement. By definition, it will have to be accepted by (many) countries". Nikosazana Dlamini-Zuma, South African Foreign Minister
"We get rid of a wall in Europe. We cannot accept another wall which cuts the world in two".
Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission
"Most world leaders do not listen. We re disappointed because too many adults are more interested in money than in the environment".
Analiz Vergara, 14, from Ecuador, Canada s Justin Friesen and Liao Mingyu from China, both 11, representing the world s children.
President George W. Bush of the USA did not make it to the Summit and he sent his Secretary of State, Colin Powell instead. It was a wise decision on Mr. Bush s part to stay way.
The man he sent got the roughest ride of all the world leaders at the conference. It would certainly be very humiliating to President Bush if he was subjected to such an onslaught.
Time will unfold, in due, course whether the Johannesburg Summit was worth while. The gathering should certainly have brought home to the millions watching that this world we live in will have to be handled with care if we want it to survive and keep up the supply of cool clearwater (so bly sung by Mick Delehunty in my dance going days), that is so vital for sustaining human life.
United front needed to fight terrorists
THE frightful dangers that those of us living on planet earth are subjected to was emphasised, in no uncertain fashion, when there was man rrested in Stockholm boarding a Ryanair flight to London with a loaded gun in his possession.
The man arrested, Karem Chatty, (29), is Swedish citizen of Tunisian origin.
Here is how The Observer reported the story in its issue of September 1, 2002:
"Security agencies across Europe are bracing themselves for a wave of terrorist attacks around the anniversary of 11 September after claims that the 29-year-old man arrested at Swedish airport with a gun in his luggage was planning to hijack a London-bound plane and fly it into a US embassy.
"British and Middle Eastern security officials say they believe that new details of the plot indicate it was a serious terrorist operation , not the work of a lone amateur as first thought.
"Intelligence experts have been warning for months that Islamic militants, some linked to Osama bin Laden s al-Qaeda group, would try to pull off a series of spectacular attacks to demonstrate that they were still capable of major actions despite the year-long war on terror .
"Sources in the Swedish intelligence services said that Kerim Chatty, who was arrested at Stockholm s Vastera airport as he tried to board a Ryanair flight to Stansted with a hand gun in his hand luggage, was part of a five-strong terrorist cell and had undergone flight training in America, possibly as early as 1996.
"The cell was based in Sweden and planned to fly the plane into an embassy in an undisclosed European country, the Stockholm sources told Reuters news agency. The American CIA confirmed the news."
Last week a court in Sweden remanded Chatty in custody for two weeks. The story that is unfolding is quite a shocker.
This Wednesday is the anniversary of the hijacked American airlines plane hitting the World Trade Centre in New York.
That dreadful deed shocked the world as never before. It has alerted us to be continually on our guard hence security at airports and elsewhere.
The alertness caught out Karem Chatty and emphasised the importance of constant vigilance.
Yes, it looks like we are living in a different world we must show a united front to ensure that the terrorist is defeated.
A glance back in time offers a fascinating insight
IT is interesting to look back and see what was happening in the world of ours one hundred years go.
There was a toy brought out that year that has been selling in the millions ever since yes the Teddy Bear first came on the scene in 1902.
Alistair Cooke, is one of his recent letters from America, told how the name came about.
I forget the name of the person who first brought out the toy. After he had "stuffed up" his toy he read in the papers that the then President of the USA was out game hunting in Mississippi when he came across a brown bear.
He took careful aim but, noticing that it was mother bear, he decided not to shoot the animal.
Seeing this in the papers at the time, the man with the toy bear wrote to the President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was known universally as Teddy Roosevelt, asking for permission to name his toy bear after him.
Permission was granted and along came the Teddy Bears that most of us put through our hands in our youth.
There were no tell-tale signs that the mobile phone was on the way back in 1902.
That year a submarine cable spanning the Pacific Ocean was completed. It was a bit behind the cable spanning the Atlantic ocean with its base on this side on Valentia Island.
This Pacrific Cable was from V ncouver Island on the west coast of Canada via Fiji to Australia and New Zealand. This cable was strictly for telegraph communications alone and could only transmit one signal at the time a far cry from today s mobile.
In 1902, the Trans Siberian Railway, the longest railway line in the world, opened for traffic. It stretches from Moscow to Vladivostok a distance of 5,777 miles. The entire trip takes about 10 days and there are more than 1,000 stations along the route.
The Aswan Dam was completed in 1902. This dam was built to contain the annual flood water of the Nile River so that they could be released gradually throughout the dry season. It took four years and a workforce of 11,000 to do the job.
In 1902 the battery that we take so much for granted today was invented by Thomas Edison. There is no way that Edison could see all the uses his battery would be put to in the years ahead.
1902 had its share of disasters like every other year.
There was an explosion in a coalmine in Australia trapping 250 miners underground 96 failed to be rescued, the rest survived.
By far the worst disaster in 1902 occurred in the island of Martinique in the French West Indies.
Some 30,000 people were reported killed when Mount Pele, the largest mountain in the island erupted. Every building in the capital city of St. Pierre was destroyed by that volcanic explosion.
So there you have it a glance at some of the things that happened just 100 years ago.
