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/ 5 February 2005
United States President George Bush’s new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, insisted on Friday that the US has no plans to attack Iran ”at this point”. Rice was speaking after Downing Street talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the beginning of a week-long tour of Europe and the Middle East.
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/ 5 February 2005
She is proud of being African, though she prefers to wear her hair straight. She is just as interested in having a career as a Western woman, though perhaps more coy about sex. That, at least, is how the first Kenyan edition of Cosmopolitan sees its target audience. What is absent from the magazine says as much as its content.
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/ 5 February 2005
It’s going to be all right. The pope is on the mend. He has had a few sips of water, has begun eating, and is breathing normally again. While the ailing 84-year-old was lying in hospital this week, Vatican business continued pretty much as normal, and the cogs of the Vatican’s vast internal bureaucracy will continue to turn in his absence.
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/ 5 February 2005
The Prime Minister of Georgia, Zurab Zhvania, was found dead in an apartment in Tbilisi early on Thursday, apparently poisoned by carbon monoxide from a faulty gas heater. The body of a friend, Raul Usupov, the deputy governor of the Kvemo-Kartli region, was also found in the prime minister’s apartment.
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/ 5 February 2005
A New York state court ruled on Friday that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, a decision hailed by gay-rights groups as a major victory. Justice Doris Ling-Cohan said preventing gay and lesbian couples from receiving marriage licenses violates basic freedoms guaranteed in the state Constitution.
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/ 5 February 2005
American animal behaviourist Kirk Turner and South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research are establishing a dog training centre in the dusty district of Brits outside the capital, Pretoria, to explore the theory that dogs, with their superior olfactory systems, can sniff out cancer in humans more accurately than machines.
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/ 5 February 2005
Although Angola applied for funding to fight malaria, the money will arrive too late to switch to more effective combination drugs and avoid another grim season of preventable deaths. Stamping out the scourge — one of the biggest killers of Angolan children — is considered a top priority by many in the health ministry, but events have undermined the good intentions of the government.
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/ 5 February 2005
A few years ago a student of mine handed in a final-year essay containing the words “correlative”, “oeuvre” and “mandate”. Since I knew the author to be an intellectual pimple who considered literature to be the <i>Cosmo</i> horoscope, a quick Google search ensued. There, replicated across half a dozen sites, were the suspiciously erudite paragraphs. I failed it, reported the plagiarist, and forgot all about it. Until, that is, I was summoned to appear before a university tribunal.
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/ 5 February 2005
The Mail & Guardian is not alone in admiring Archbishop Desmond Tutu (”Some amongst us admire the Arch”). There are many in the African National Congress who admire him too. As an organisation, the ANC has often paid tribute to his contribution to the struggle for democracy in South Africa and to his continued importance to our national life, writes Smuts Ngonyama.
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/ 5 February 2005
”President Thabo Mbeki, allow me to address you in an open letter. Despite my growing animosity towards your personal philosophies, I have been able to handle almost everything you have said and written as president. Until you (or one of your cronies) claimed, on the African National Congress website, that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is the icon of white people,” writes Koos Kombuis.