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/ 26 December 2007
In the minds of its creators, the Tinapa resort in south-eastern Nigeria will rival Dubai or London as a shopping and trading paradise for rich and enterprising Nigerians. In reality, about -million has been spent since 2005, but 80 000 square metres of pristine retail space lie empty.
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/ 26 December 2007
Helping illegal immigrants has become an unpopular business in the United States. Republican and Democratic presidential candidates alike have backed down from any previous support for illegal immigrants, and ordinary Americans are treading just as carefully in the face of a growing backlash against the 12-million people here illegally.
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/ 26 December 2007
In 1999, Texas governor George Bush publicly confused Slovenia with Slovakia at a time when both belonged to a group of ex-communist East European states striving to join the European Union. In January, Slovenia, tucked below Austria on the eastern shoulder of Italy, takes over the EU’s six-month presidency.
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/ 26 December 2007
Few diseases inspire as much panic as an outbreak of Ebola fever. In Uganda — where 100 000 people die of malaria each year — an epidemic of a new Ebola strain has killed just 36 people and infected 135 others, but is causing widespread terror. However, experts say much of the panic is overblown.
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/ 26 December 2007
Malaysia’s drive to woo investment is losing traction, as efforts to get rid of red tape and inept bureaucrats falter, threatening to put it further behind neighbouring Singapore. A year after the authorities vowed to speed up the business approval process, businessmen are still battling unwieldy procedures and inert government staff.
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/ 26 December 2007
A giant kite designed to help slash the spiralling cost of fuel consumption could herald the winds of change for commercial cargo shipping. The first freighter to be fitted with the hi-tech sail was launched in the north German port of Hamburg in December by Eva Luise Koehler, wife of German President Horst Koehler.
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/ 26 December 2007
American Louise Firouz made Iran her home half a century ago. Now 75, she runs a stud farm in the remote north-east and has watched the turbulent transformation of her adopted country from United States ally to arch-foe. She moved to Tehran in the 1950s to marry a young Iranian aristocrat.
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/ 26 December 2007
It was the kind of breakthrough scientists had dreamed of for decades and its promise to help cure disease appears to be fast on the way to being realised. Researchers in November announced they were able to turn the clock back on skin cells and transform them into stem cells, the mutable building blocks of organs and tissues.
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/ 26 December 2007
Sucking up sugar cane with their trunks and circling busy traffic roundabouts, the elephants that roam Thai towns at festival time seem as much at home in the city as in the forest. But entertaining locals and tourists is now a life-or-death business for elephants and their keepers.
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/ 25 December 2007
Had I been two shades lighter, I would have turned red with embarrassment when strangers inquired if I was ”Ronnie Pillay’s daughter. You’re that reporter at the Natal Witness newspaper. How was your scholarship to America?” they asked. It was the late 1990s and my father had been telling his friends about his eldest daughter’s exploits.