Uganda is adopting sexual abstinence-only programmes financed by the United States that could undo its successes. Human Rights Watch warns that the new policies, which promote abstinence until marriage rather than condom use, leave not only young unmarried people but also women married to unfaithful men without the knowledge they need to protect themselves from infection.
The development economist Guy Mhone, a Wits professor of public and development management, passed away at a Pretoria hospital on Tuesday, at the age of 62. Born in Luanshya, Zambia, and raised along the border with Malawi (the country of his citizenship), Mhone resisted colonial Central African Federation repression and then the brutality of the Banda era.
China must restrict its textile exports to avoid destabilising world trade with a flood of cheap goods, the European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, warned last week. Speaking in China for the first time since taking on the European Union trade portfolio, Mandelson said many developing nations were unwilling to enter a new round of negotiations because they feared China would seize the lion’s share of benefits.
With demonstrators shouting religious slogans outside, United States Supreme Court justices this week argued and fretted over whether the Ten Commandments displayed on government property cross the line between church and state. Arguments in cases from Texas and Kentucky were the court’s first consideration of the issue since 1980, when justices ruled that they could not be displayed in public schools.
Three years after sanctions against ”conflict diamonds” helped end Angola’s civil war, the country’s diamond industry continues to thrive on violence and corruption, according to a report to be released next week by Angolan human-rights activists. Angola’s Deadly Diamonds details incidents of murder, beating, detention without trial, extortion and rape attributed to the Angolan police.
A new strain of HIV – resistant to three of the four classes of anti-retroviral drugs available – has been identified in New York, according to city health officials. Of particular concern was the rapidity at which the strain progressed to Aids in the infected individual.
In their complex and protracted mediation efforts in Africa, South African negotiators have long since learned not to believe everything they read on the news pages. But they dare not ignore the finance pages. So when the New Forces rebel movement in Côte d’Ivoire reportedly pronounced the mediation efforts dead and buried this week, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad remained sanguine.
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Talk is cheap, but carrying out the promises you make less so. That being the case, has all the talk about ensuring equality between men and women in South Africa resulted in action where it counts most: the allocation of funds along gender lines in the national budget? Nearly a decade ago, the Ministry of Finance promised to provide a breakdown of ways in which the budget promoted gender equality.
Trade ministers from 33 countries on Thursday began crafting a ”rough” plan to conclude talks to liberalise global commerce further by 2006, paying particular attention to the interests of poorer countries, officials said. ”We want the Doha round [of trade talks] to be completed successfully next year,” Kenyan Trade Minister Mukhisa Kituyi said.