http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3045&art_id=vn20080804052925829C145416

Eight killed as fires raze settlements

August 04 2008 at 07:31AM

By Gugu Mbonambi

Eight people, including several children, died and dozens were left homeless after fires swept through two shack settlements in Durban at the weekend.

Ward 31 councillor Gloria Borman said five people, who had been locked in a shack and were unable to get out, were burnt beyond recognition.

http://www.sundaytribune.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4540242

Front Page
Rats plague community

August 03, 2008 Edition 3

Rat poison was put down at the Kennedy Road informal settlement this week by health authorities, but residents are not expecting the rat plague to end.

Residents say the eThekwini health department had used poison previously but nothing had changed, and rats were now bigger and meaner.

The settlement was in the news recently after two-month-old Wandile Cikwayo's hand was gnawed by a rat. He is in a critical condition in Addington Hospital. Earlier this year a 4-month-old baby was bitten on the head by a rat. He later died from his wounds as his parents did not have money to take him to hospital and were waiting for the Clare Estate Clinic to open on the Monday.

As in New Orleans, as in Pietermartizburg a flood, it seems that any sort will do, becomes the excuse to expel the poor from the city (this time via a spell in tents in a bourgeois park.)

http://www.sundaytribune.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4225627

Sunday Tribune
Front Page
Berea park families to 'move by Easter'

January 27, 2008 Edition 1

Chris Makhaye

BUSISIWE Masikane is one of more than 85 people who have been living in a tent in a park on Berea's Ridge Road.

http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4222239
The Mercury

Shack demolitions halted

January 25, 2008 Edition 1

Tania Broughton

WHILE two little boys played in the rain in the ruins of a neighbour's home, lawyers acting for shack dwellers from Reservoir Hills were in the Durban High Court securing an interim interdict preventing the council demolishing any more homes.

The urgent court action against the eThekwini Municipality by six Annette Drive settlement residents came after officials from the city's land invasion unit destroyed three shacks there earlier this month and another yesterday.

http://www.dailynews.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4215707

Arsonists target anti-drug activists
Crime campaigner injured in petrol bombing

January 21, 2008 Edition 3

Sharlene Packree

Desmond D'Sa's burn scars will forever remind him of the forces opposed to Wentworth's anti-drug and crime campaign.

On Friday, D'Sa's Austerville flat was targeted by petrol bomb-wielding arsonists.

In a desperate bid to put out the flames that threatened the lives of his wife and two daughters, D'Sa suffered burns to his hands and face.

Yesterday, the smell of petrol still lingered in the air as D'Sa inspected his home.

As in New Orleans a flood becomes the excuse to expel the poor from the city...

http://www.witness.co.za/?showcontent&global[_id]=2369

Over 300 shack-dwellers homeless again
16 Jan 2008

The urgent need to once again relocate Jika Joe shack-dwellers was highlighted yesterday when the informal settlement was wrecked by floods on Monday night.

Some 40 shacks were washed down the Dorpspruit River, displacing about 300 people, including children.

Yesterday morning, hundreds were left homeless after a sleepless night during which they helplessly stood by and watched their homes and possessions being washed away in the deluge.

http://squattercity.blogspot.com/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080111.wreckondoug0111/BNStory/International/home

Slumming it is better than bulldozing it

DOUG SAUNDERS

Globe and Mail Update

January 12, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST

This is going to be a big year for the wrecking ball. By the time it's over, two of the world's most famous neighbourhoods will be gone, replaced with scaffolds, cement mixers and the sort of well-meaning mistakes that have scarred the cities of the West for decades.

The photo accompanying this article was taken on Christmas Eve in the sprawling Mumbai slum of Nehru Nagar. On an eerily quiet warm winter evening, photographer Subhash Kumar Sharma watched as a self-built, decades-old neighbourhood containing tens of thousands of people emptied itself out in advance of wrecking equipment. High-rise office buildings and carefully planned public-housing towers, some already built, are replacing this old, peaceful, rambunctiously squalid neighbourhood.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=326470&area=/insight/insight__national/

A lethal find
Pearlie Joubert
01 December 2007 11:59

A massive row is brewing between the Joe Slovo squatter community and the government after a Cape Town professor found the presence of the lethal crocidolite asbestos in material similar to that used to build the walls of temporary houses in Delft -- a suburb outside Cape Town where government wants to move this 25 000-strong community.

Crocidolite is the most lethal carcinogenic known and, if inhaled, causes mesothelioma, an aggressive and untreatable lung cancer. South Africa is believed to have the world’s highest rate of masothelioma and one of the highest rates of asbestosis.