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/ 30 October 2006
Winning a two-year non-permanent seat on the 15-member United Nations Security Council from January 2007, with an impressive 186 out of 192 votes, is a great achievement for South Africa. The euphoria has, however, tended to obscure the reality of how limited a role non-permanent members are able to play in council decisions.
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/ 30 October 2006
Leading lawyers have questioned the United States’s appetite for condemning white-collar fraudsters to decades behind bars, in a debate ignited by the sentencing of Enron’s former CE Jeffrey Skilling. Skilling was due to appear before a judge in Houston to hear his fate.
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/ 30 October 2006
After the first killing, there was a great deal of sympathy for the Honourable Tom Cholmondeley among Kenya’s disparate white population. The aristocrats who own vast tracts of land, the alcohol and drug-fuelled ”Kenya cowboys” living the fast life in tourism and conservation, and the middle-class suburbanites who ”love Africa” but despatch their children to school in England could all understand how the 38-year-old scion of the country’s most prominent white settler family.
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/ 30 October 2006
Winning a two-year non-permanent seat on the 15-member United Nations Security Council from January 2007, with an impressive 186 out of 192 votes, is a great achievement for South Africa. The euphoria has, however, tended to obscure the reality of how limited a role non-permanent members are able to play in council decisions.
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/ 30 October 2006
For millennia, the Mediterranean has fed its coastal peoples with abundant fish, but now it threatens to become a barren sea. Overfishing is taking a heavy toll on fish stocks, with the numbers of tuna plummeting and anchovy becoming scarce in the western Mediterranean. ”Many species are becoming increasingly rare,” says Alain Bonzon, secretary general of a commission monitoring fishing in the Mediterranean.
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/ 30 October 2006
Moves to expel 150 000 Arabs who have settled in Niger over the past three decades are already underway, one day after the government made the surprise announcement that the Arabs, known as Mahamid, would have five days to leave the country. Many of the Arabs settled in Niger after leaving neighbouring Chad following the 1974 drought and again during the Chadian civil war of the 1980s.
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/ 30 October 2006
Thousands of people attended the launch of a new political party in the tiny African kingdom of Lesotho on Sunday, with its leader pledging to spearhead a war on poverty. Tom Thabane, a former foreign minister who quit Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili’s government earlier this month, told supporters of the All Basotho Convention that it was a time for a change.
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/ 30 October 2006
Free train rides, free rock concerts, free baseball games, December bonuses in November: Christmas has come early to Venezuela. Or, to put it another way, an election is due. The government is striving for a feelgood atmosphere by unleashing a torrent of cash and promising more to come in the run-up to a poll in which President Hugo Chávez is seeking another term.
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/ 30 October 2006
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for a baby boom to almost double the country’s population to 120-million and enable it to threaten the West, as he boasted that the country’s nuclear capacity had increased ”tenfold”. Ahmadinejad told MPs he wanted to scrap birth control policies that discourage Iranian couples from having more than two children.