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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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/ 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
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
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
When the history of climate change is written, 2007 will deserve a chapter all to itself. In just 12 months, global warming has been elevated to the great challenge of our time, a cause for public and celebrities alike, a Nobel-winning issue and a headache for politicians of every rank.
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/ 26 December 2007
Israel and the Palestinians head into 2008 pledging to seal an ever-elusive peace deal by the end of the year, but with their revived negotiations off to a rocky start. The talks held since the two sides relaunched the Middle East peace process after a nearly seven-year hiatus have been overshadowed by expansion of Israeli settlements.
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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.