Sexuality is still a taboo topic in many societies — and the taboo is even greater for people with disabilities. "Parents and relatives believe that a woman with a disability should not engage in sex," says Gladys Charowa, founder member and director of Harare’s Disabled Women Support Organisation.
South Africa has allocated nearly $50-million to win the site bid for the world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array. The country is vying against Australia, Argentina and China to host this prestigious European Commission-funded science project.
Deep changes to the judicial system are urgently needed. Just about no one disputes that. Too many relics of the apartheid and colonial past persist in the structure of provincial divisions. And the absence of rigorous, credible and transparent mechanisms to hold judges accountable for their conduct is proving increasingly problematic for the administration of justice.
It is not yet quite a year since Israel withdrew its forces and dismantled illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip, though there has always been a grim inevitability about the offensive — codenamed Summer Rain — that Ehud Olmert unleashed this week to try to free a soldier abducted by Palestinian fighters.
Radio Marco Zero is a tiny radio station in Amapa, one of Brazil’s remotest Amazon states. Yet its few thousand listeners in the state capital, Macapa, have for the past month been able to hear exclusive hourly updates about the Brazilian national team. ”In the 254 years since Macapa was founded, no one has ever had the chance to come to a World Cup,” says Tarciso Franco, one of the station’s two journalists in Germany.
A tip-off from Virgin Atlantic led to the price-fixing inquiry into British Airways (BA), it has emerged, marking a return to the hostile relations that existed between the two airlines during the ”dirty tricks” campaign of the 1990s. BA was plunged into crisis after it said that the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading and the Justice Department in the United States are conducting a joint investigation into allegations of price-fixing.
The subject matter was untested, the actors almost naked and the whole movie was to be made in a language spoken by only a tiny group of people — but to film executive Brian Rosen, funding Australia’s latest international film success, Ten Canoes, was a ”no-brainer”.
Two of the guests invited to the seventh summit of the African Union in The Gambia this weekend are sure to get up the noses of Africa’s best Western friends.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, will share a platform with the leaders of the 53-nation grouping and, who knows, perhaps even upstage the enigmatic Moammar Gadaffi of Libya.
Nothing could have conjured the images of a riven country more eloquently than the Zimbabwe national day of prayer. An event meant to unite a country was marked by a slanging match that would not have looked out of place before a heavyweight boxing match.
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