Zimbabweans mark 26 years of independence on Tuesday with little to celebrate amid deepening economic hardships, personal tragedies and a rapidly widening gap between the rich elite and the poor majority. President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party on Monday said it was ”disturbed” that young Zimbabweans, in particular, showed no pride in their nation’s independence from colonial-era white rule.
Rural Ireland is fighting the growing trend for tourists to spend long weekends in Dublin with a plan to woo visitors to the Emerald Isle’s hidden gems. "There is a European trend for mini-breaks of three or four days. In our country, this favours the cities, like Dublin, Cork or Galway," said Damian O’Brien, in charge of developing cultural tourism in Ireland.
Authorities in Romania and Bulgaria were working frantically on Monday to shore up flood defences after the Danube reached its highest levels for more than a century. Emergency teams and soldiers were trying to prevent further flooding, after a weekend in which hundreds of people were forced to flee their homes. Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria were the worst hit.
New laws have been passed in the United States to counter the activities of a bizarre church that has been disrupting military funerals with anti-gay protests on the grounds that the soldiers died fighting for a land that tolerates homosexuality. Since last year, the Westboro Baptist church, based in Topeka, Kansas, has been picketing funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, waving signs saying, ”Thank God for Dead Soldiers”.
Although the United States is resisting pressure to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions through direct talks with Tehran, rather than sanctions or military strikes, it still intends to meet senior Iranian officials for discussions on Iraq at which it will demand an end to Iranian meddling, according to Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador in Baghdad.
Research across the world shows that involved parents enhance children’s achievement. This also increases the resources available to children, teachers, parents and the school, and often leads to collaboration with businesses within the community.
"As so often, a momentous development creates a shorthand. The rise of ‘Bric’, as the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China are known, is, by common political currency, the biggest strategic issue facing Britain. And the implications are cultural as well as economic," writes Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London.
Twenty wooden classrooms surrounding a grass patch and flanked by poplar trees constituted the Pretoria Indian Primary School. It was built in the heart of the bustling, thriving, sometimes dangerous and always exciting Marabastad, just outside the Pretoria city centre. The year was 1964, writes Jody Kollapen, chairperson of the SA Human Rights Commission.
One would think the 21st century would be the age of reason and tolerance. Sadly, for the faithful, the era is proving to be as traumatic as the days when it was heresy to dare suggest that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. In France, Muslims are forbidden by law from wearing their scarves at schools and other public spaces, because this offends that country’s proud secular tradition.
The Dead Sea is dying, with the world’s saltiest water body threatened by a lack of fresh water and an increasingly tense political situation, environmentalists have warned. The bare, sun-baked landscape around the Dead Sea has since Biblical times been fed by the Jordan river’s fresh water.