The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid back below the 11 000 mark in early trading on Tuesday after falling nearly 200 points on Monday, as Ben Bernanke’s baptism of fire as chairperson of the United States Federal Reserve prompted a fresh bout of jitters on Wall Street.
Spain is about to take the world into uncharted legal territory. Later this month, a resolution is going before Parliament that, if passed as expected, will give a set of rights to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans. These great apes will then be regarded in Spanish law as ”legal persons”.
The migration of whales to South Africa’s coastline has begun, just as another annual but far less rewarding spectacle is about to unfold in the Caribbean. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) meets from June 16 to 20 in St Kitts. Once more the tussle between pro-whalers and anti-whalers is poised on a knife-edge.
”I think it’s sexy,” Donald Bradford says of the bushy growth that has adorned his upper lip for the past two months.Largely shunned since the 1980s, moustaches are enjoying something of a renaissance among young New Yorkers, following a comeback trail blazed by such hip role models as actor Nicolas Cage and the ultra-trendy fashion photographer Terry Richardson.
Recently, Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula told persistent ‘whingers’ about crime to emigrate. Do they include Hazel Makuzeni, who begged him earlier this year in the M&G to do something about runaway crime in Khayelitsha? This is Makuzeni’s latest bulletin from ‘the war zone’
Malika Labazanova crouched on the floor of her house at number 20, Third Tsimlyansky Lane, Grozny. A young man in camouflage fatigues held the muzzle of an automatic rifle against her head. Both were citizens of the same country, Russia, but he represented the government, and she did not.
Daniel Ortega led a rogue state before rogue states were invented. As chief engineer of Nicaragua’s 1980s left-wing Sandinista revolution, he became Ronald Reagan’s favourite Central American whipping boy. The United States government conspired with so-called Contra rebels to overthrow him. He was eventually voted out of office in 1990, beaten by a US-backed candidate.
The death of al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on Wednesday in Baquba, during a joint United States-Jordanian operation, was hailed as ”great news” on Thursday, but there were differing views on whether it would lead to a break in the violent insurgency that has wracked the Middle East nation.
The Bush administration stared down a new wave of international condemnation of Guantánamo on Sunday, dismissing the suicides by three inmates of the prison camp as a ”good PR move” on their part and an ”act of asymmetrical warfare”. The hard line from an administration official comes at a time of increasing international criticism at the handling of terror suspects at Guantánamo.
Twenty-five years after the first Aids cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic which is likely to spread to every corner of the globe, the head of the United Nations’s Aids agency has said.