From our own correspondents: Alt(ish) media is charging up batteries for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. The Daily Summit, a weblog set up with help from the British Council, hopes to post news and gossip as it happens from the streets and conference centres of Johannesburg. Also worth bookmarking for the Summit's untold stories is South Africa Indymedia. One way or another, pace Gil Scott-Heron, the conference will be blogged.

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Yesterday was Hiroshima Day: At a ceremony to mark the dropping 57 years ago of the first nuclear bomb, Tadatoshi Akiba, mayor of Hiroshima, protested against US unilateralism: "America has not been given the right to impose a 'Pax Americana' and to decide the fate of the world. . . Rather, we, the people of the world, have the right to insist that we have not given you the authority to destroy the world." [CNN].

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds." [From the film The Day After Trinity].

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