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/ 10 December 2004
A senior CIA analyst who was once decorated for his work on weapons proliferation in the Middle East has accused the spy agency of ruining his career as punishment for his refusal to adhere to official pre-war ”dogma” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
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/ 10 December 2004
Scholars are generally agreed that, in the natural evolutionary process of language, words change their meaning. In a Darwinlike process they adapt to their environments and climates and thus survive. Take ”clinic”, for example, which derives from the Greek klinikos — kline, a bed. Words adapt to their usage, as indeed do their pronunciations. As an example, anyone listening to our television newscasts will have noticed the decomposition of the word ”protest”.
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/ 10 December 2004
The dust had hardly settled on Tuesday this week before the squabbling started.
Had the vote of Gold Fields’s shareholders truly represented the majority view? Did the vote, which rejected the group’s plans to merge its assets outside South Africa with those of Canada’s IAMGold, represent a motion of no confidence in the group’s directors? Was it a proxy vote in favour of the hostile bid by Harmony Gold?
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/ 10 December 2004
The villagers in Egebeleku community have clean water. Shell built the project, powered by solar panels, to improve relations with the local communities they work alongside in the oil-rich but notoriously volatile Niger Delta. However, visitors hear one persistent whisper: "Put me in the Shell work, I need a job; I don’t have any work at all." The pleas of the youths lie at the heart of the problems that haunt Africa’s biggest oil producer.
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/ 10 December 2004
The Department of Trade and Industry is to launch the Small Enterprise Development Agency (Seda) next week, replacing small-business promotion agencies Ntsika and the National Manufacturing Advice Centre (Namac). The move represents a policy shift by the department, and Seda will provide non-financial advisory and support services.
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/ 10 December 2004
Who do you believe, Marion Jones or Victor Conte? The question was posed by Jones’s lawyer when the Olympic star was accused by Conte of having taken performance-enhancing drugs. The accusations have been the story in the United States, and beyond, over the past week.
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/ 10 December 2004
Right, then. The situation is this: Just two months after his appointment, and with one short tour and two Test matches under his belt, South African cricket coach Ray Jennings has been told by his employers to watch his mouth. There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand, many will think it remarkable that Jennings lasted two months before being told to shut up.
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/ 10 December 2004
The so-called blood transfusion scandal illustrates precisely why we need technocrats and why it can be dangerous to air technocratic arguments in public — there should not be a simple opposition to technocracy, as argued in a recent M&G supplement. In many instances, there is little room for misinterpretation of statistics, as the process of interpretation is itself just a conversion of the statistics into a different form.
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/ 10 December 2004
The new Zanu-PF leadership has thrown down the gauntlet to the Zimbabwean War Veterans’ Association and warned them not to ”behave like renegades or anarchists”. A war of words has erupted between the two sides, a battle that can intensify as the primaries draw closer.
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/ 10 December 2004
There is a fault line running through Ukraine that is a product of its history and people. To talk about the history of Ukraine as simply one of Russian occupation is to disenfranchise the voice and identity of a large chunk of its population. If you are not a Uniate Catholic from western Ukraine, you are likely to be Russian Orthodox from the east or south. Hence real democracy can only be achieved if it is accepted as a multi-ethnic state.