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/ 4 January 2008

The new-generation space station

Some time before 2050, satellites collecting solar power and beaming it back to Earth will become a primary energy source, streaming terawatts of electricity continuously from space. That’s if you believe a recent report from the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office.

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/ 4 January 2008

The new-generation space station

Some time before 2050, satellites collecting solar power and beaming it back to Earth will become a primary energy source, streaming terawatts of electricity continuously from space. That’s if you believe a recent report from the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office.

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/ 4 January 2008

Birth of the e-reader

It is almost 40 years since Roland Barthes announced the death of the author and called for the "birth of the reader" in that annus mirabilis of French history, 1968. For Barthes, it was the reader who should decide literary meaning. To a degree, authors were already playing this game before Barthes.

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/ 4 January 2008

Six-week delay in elections

President Pervez Musharraf said recently that troops would stay on the streets of Pakistan’s tense cities at least until a new election date of February 18. Parliamentary elections, intended to provide a transition to democracy after more than eight years of military rule, had been scheduled for January 8, but a controversial six-week delay was announced by the country’s election commission.

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/ 4 January 2008

At the root of the violence

The damning admission recently by the chairperson of the Electoral Commission of Kenya, Samuel Kivuitu, that re-elected President Mwai Kibaki might not have won the fiercely contested presidential election has confirmed suspicions that the process was flawed and that the announced results did not reflect Kenyans’ votes.

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/ 4 January 2008

Unsound fury

This is to be the bellwether year for South Africa’s democracy when we either build on the Constitution’s dictate that we live by the rule of its law and the breadth of its vision or we turn that Constitution into a loud-sounding nothing by becoming a nation of populists given to keeping skeletons in cupboards.

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/ 4 January 2008

Horror in a church and a country in turmoil

Grace Githuthwa heard the attackers before she saw them. They were singing war songs, running from two sides towards the church compound where she and 200 others were sheltering from outbursts of ethnic violence. She grabbed her four children and ran inside the Kenya Assemblies of God Pentecostal church.

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/ 4 January 2008

Saints on your cell

Anyone who visits Italy sees one sooner or later, most likely tucked into the frame of a mirror above a bar or taped to the dashboard of a taxi. But lots of devout Roman Catholic Italians carry them in their wallets and purses — little cards bearing the picture (or at least the imagined likeness) of a saint or other religious figure.

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/ 4 January 2008

Tutu to broker peace deal

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was in Nairobi in a bid to mediate between newly-elected President Mwai Kibaki and defeated opposition leader Raila Odinga on Thursday, said at a media conference that Odinga had accepted his mediation. Sources close to the mediation also told the Mail & Guardian that Odinga had dropped his demand that Kibaki resign before the two sit down to talk peace.