• Green car needs greenbacks: The global credit crisis could delay production of South Africa’s Joule electric car as the manufacturing company, Optimal Energy, needs to raise more than $130-million dollars to build an assembly plant. [More].
• Please release me: A rare female whale shark being kept as an attraction in an aquarium in Sol Kerner’s recently opened Atlantis resort in Dubai (he also built SA’s Sun City megaresort) has provoked the ire of environmentalists and the public. A local newspaper has launched a “Free Sammy the Shark” campaign and a Facebook group has been set up calling for the shark’s release. [More]

Parliamentarians from a cross-section of political parties have formed a lobby group to get things moving in the renewable energy sector in South Africa. This week they unveiled a private members bill on feed-in tariffs.

The first of Southern Africa’s legal ivory auctions will be held today in Windhoek, Namibia. Willem Wijnstekers, the secretary-general of Cites is in Namibia to oversee the sale, the proceeds of which are supposed to go to elephant conservation and community developmet projects.

The Worldwide Blogger Bake Off is a campaign of Breadline Africa that aims to raise $1-million for poverty alleviation in Africa.

• Rebels have taken over the headquarters of the Virunga National Park, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which is home to more than a quarter of the world’s 700 remaining mountain gorillas. [AFP].
• A previously unknown coral reef has been discovered in the Seychelles, south of Curieuse Island. There are plans to establish a centre of marine research on the island. [ScienceDaily]
• Vegetarians have been listed as one of a number of groups using Twitter as a “social activism tool” in a draft US army intelligence report that looks at the potential use of mobile and web technologies by “militants”. [AFP]