No image available
/ 3 December 2004
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, threw his weight behind holding totally new elections in Ukraine on Thursday, rejecting the idea favoured by the European Union of a quick repeat of the fraud-ridden runoff vote that has pitched the country into crisis.
Signs of compromise in Ukraine
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
The Bush administration is funding sexual health projects that teach children that HIV can be contracted through sweat and tears, touching genitals can result in pregnancy, and that a 43-day-old foetus is a thinking person. A congressional analysis of more than a dozen federally funded ”abstinence-only programmes” unveiled a litany of ”false, misleading and distorted information”.
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
The conversation had turned towards the literary potential of the Garden Route, but despite the Major’s staccato insistences that he had once skimmed a slim volume about a resourceful prostitute with a wooden leg living in Knysna, it was agreed that nothing readable had ever been set in the bosky territory that lay beyond the polo field.
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
Salitun Lu in the Chaoyang district is known as Beijing’s "Bar Street". With more than 200 bars to choose from, how do you decide where to go and sip on Tsingtao beer? One suggestion is to flip a coin. Heads means three bars to the right, tails means every third bar to the left. <i>Escape</i> gets a taste of the bar culture that has taken hold of the Chinese capital.
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
The increasingly desperate struggle sparked by Harmony’s hostile bid climaxes in a shareholders meeting this week. Gold Fields’s shareholders will vote on the proposal that their company should merge its mining interests outside South Africa with those of Canadian miner IAMGold. The merger would result in a new company, to be called Gold Fields International, owned 30% by IAMGold’s present shareholders and 70% by Gold Fields’s.
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
Ghana’s President John Kufuor of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) is on course to win a second term. The country’s opposition candidate, John Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is struggling to emerge from the shadow of former NDC leader Jerry Rawlings ahead of elections on December 7. Rawlings’s high profile is making Atta Mills look weak, reducing his support among undecided voters.
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
<img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/142915/aids_icon.gif" align=left>Researchers are expressing cautious optimism about several microbicide products. There are hopes that a gel that reduces — if not prevents — transmission rates by as much as 60% could be on the market by 2007. As with most microbicides under the microscope, these two products are entry inhibitors, preventing the virus from attaching to its target cells.
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
A new colour has emerged in Ukraine’s polarised political spectrum. Students in Kharkov, worried by the escalating confrontation between Viktor Yushchenko’s orange revolutionaries and the blue-and-white supporters of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, have established a "green" movement called We Are for Peace! with the aim of bringing the two sides together
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
The British sociologist Stuart Hall has used the expression "moral panic" to describe a situation in which large numbers of people are persuaded that some vital good or right of theirs is under dire threat. Much of the "Bram Fischer debate", concerning a posthumous honorary doctorate being awarded by the University of Stellenbosch, has the dimensions of exactly such a panic.
No image available
/ 3 December 2004
Former South African wicketkeeper Mark Boucher may well be back in the national cricket squad when it is announced next Tuesday, but opening batsman Herschelle Gibbs might not. That was the opinion of national coach Ray Jennings when the team returned from India on Friday.
Proteas turning the corner